hostapd (host access point daemon) is a user space

daemon Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The word ...

software enabling a

network interface card A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

to act as an access point and

authentication server An authentication server provides a network service that applications use to authentication, authenticate the credentials, usually account names and passwords, of their users. When a client submits a valid set of credentials, it receives a cryptogr ...

. There are three implementations:

Jouni Malinen HostAP was one of the most popular IEEE 802.11 device drivers for Linux and since November 2016 is officially obsolete in Linux kernel. It works with cards using the Conexant (formerly Intersil) Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset and support Host AP mode, whi ...

's hostapd,

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...

's hostapd and Devicescape's hostapd.

Jouni Malinen's hostapd
Linux Wireless Wiki

Jouni Malinen's hostapd is a user space daemon (computer software), daemon for access point and authentication servers. It can be used to create a wireless hotspot using a Linux computer.
Creating A Wireless Hotspot with Linux It implements

IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer commun ...

access point management,

IEEE 802.1X IEEE 802.1X is an IEEE Standard for port-based Network Access Control (PNAC). It is part of the IEEE 802.1 group of networking protocols. It provides an authentication mechanism to devices wishing to attach to a LAN or WLAN. IEEE 802.1X defines t ...

WPA WPA may refer to: Computing *Wi-Fi Protected Access, a wireless encryption standard *Windows Product Activation, in Microsoft software licensing * Wireless Public Alerting (Alert Ready), emergency alerts over LTE in Canada * Windows Performance An ...

WPA2 Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2), and Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) are the three security and security certification programs developed after 2000 by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks. The All ...

/ EAP Authenticators,

RADIUS In classical geometry, a radius ( : radii) of a circle or sphere is any of the line segments from its center to its perimeter, and in more modern usage, it is also their length. The name comes from the latin ''radius'', meaning ray but also the ...

client, EAP server, and RADIUS authentication server. The current version supports

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

( Host AP
MadWifiPrism54
and some of the drivers which use the kernel's

mac80211 A wireless network interface controller (WNIC) is a network interface controller which connects to a wireless network, such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, rather than a wired network, such as a Token Ring or Ethernet. A WNIC, just like other NICs, wor ...

subsystem),

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

(net80211), and

DragonFlyBSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in Jun ...

OpenBSD's hostapd

OpenBSD's hostapd is a user space daemon that helps to improve roaming and monitoring of

-based wireless networks. It implements Inter Access Point Protocol (IAPP) for exchanging station association information between access points. It can trigger a set of actions like frame injection or logging when receiving specified

frames.

Devicescape's hostapd

The

Open Wireless Linux Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001 * ''Open'' ( ...

version of hostapd. It is kept as close as possible to the original open source release, but with OWL specific packaging and defaults. The website appears to be dead (April 2013), probably as the project itself.

References

External links

DragonFlyBSD commitUndeadly Article
* Wi-Fi OpenBSD {{Linux-stub

Jouni Malinen's hostapd Linux Wireless Wiki

OpenBSD's hostapd

Devicescape's hostapd

See also

References

External links

Jouni Malinen's hostapd
Linux Wireless Wiki