Support for database access control?

[Ed W]

Hi, I have a desire to allow per user authentication, but my application 
is on a small embedded appliance (which is mainly disconnected from the 
internet) and I want to keep dependencies minimal (freeradius seems like 
a large extra dependency?).  The user accounts are stored in a separate 
database with passwords in an iterated blowfish format (bcrypt)

Any suggestions on the simplest way to interface this with hostapd?

Seems like I could either look to some general hook to hostapd to call 
some external app to do the auth check, or I could look at a very 
lightweight custom radius server to interface to my DB (any 
suggestions?  I have perl on this box)

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Ed W