WPA utilities

The wlconfig library is a generic configuration library that interfaces to the supplicant and provides a programmatic interface for configuring your wireless connection.

The main utilities required for Wi-Fi usage are:

wpa_supplicant
Wi-Fi Protected Access client and IEEE 802.1X supplicant. This daemon provides client-side authentication, key management, and network persistence.

The wpa_supplicant requires the following libraries and binaries be present:

  • libcrypto.so — crypto library
  • libssl.so — Secure Socket Library (created from OpenSSL)
  • random — executable that creates /dev/urandom for random-number generation
  • libm.so — math library required by random
  • libz.so — compression library required by random

The wpa_supplicant also needs a read/write filesystem for creation of a ctrl_interface directory (see the sample wpa_supplicant.conf configuration file).

Note: You can't use /dev/shmem because it isn't possible to create a directory there.
wpa_cli
WPA command-line client for interacting with wpa_supplicant.
wpa_passphrase
Set the WPA passphrase for a SSID.
hostapd
Server side (Access Point) authentication and key-management daemon.

There are also some subsidiary utilities that you likely won't need to use:

wiconfig
Configuration utility for some wireless drivers. The ifconfig utility can handle the device configuration required without needing this utility.
wlanctl
Examine the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN client/peer table.