guide/WPA Supplicant

wpa_supplicant is a free software implementation of an IEEE 802.11i supplicant for Linux, BSD and Microsoft Windows. In addition to being a full-featured WPA2 supplicant, it also has support for WPA and older wireless LAN security protocols. Supported features include:

• WPA and full IEEE 802.11i/RSN/WPA2
• WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK (pre-shared key) ("WPA-Personal")
• WPA with EAP (e.g., with RADIUS authentication server) ("WPA-Enterprise")
• key management for CCMP, TKIP, WEP (both 104/128 and 40/64 bit)
• RSN: PMKSA caching, pre-authentication

Included with the supplicant are:

• a graphical user interface
• a command-line interface utility for interacting with the running supplicant.

From either of these interfaces it is possible to review a list of currently visible networks, select one of them, provide any additional security information needed to authenticate with the network (e.g. a passphrase or username and password) and add it to the preference list to enable automatic reconnection in the future.

The graphical user interface is built on top of the Qt library from Trolltech.

The command-line tool eapol_test can be used to verify whether a FreeRADIUS server is responding to EAP authorization requests.

EAP methods

Supported EAP methods include:

• EAP-TLS
• EAP-PEAP (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-TTLS
• EAP-SIM
• EAP-AKA
• EAP-PSK (experimental)
• EAP-FAST
• EAP-PAX
• LEAP (note: requires special support from the driver)

See also

• NetworkManager

External links

• Official web site