will wpa_supplication support for advanced AP features (e.g. mac address based authentication)

Jouni Malinen j at w1.fi
Mon Dec 28 05:54:33 PST 2015


On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 06:49:32PM +0800, 邢冲 wrote:
> As I know wpa_supplicant only implements a subset of hostapd. For example,
> we want the feature of mac address based authentication, which only exists
> in hostapd, and missing in wpa_supplicant.

wpa_supplicant does actually use MAC address -based limitation for one
use cases (P2P group formation). However, I'd like to make it clear that
this is not really authentication and "advanced AP feature".. It is
trivial to change the MAC address of a device and this does not add any
real security.

> Is there any plan that wpa_supplicant support such AP features?

If there is a reasonable use case for it, sure, it could be added. No
such use case has come up so far, though..

> Or even will hostapd and wpa_supplicant be merged?And so that we can expect
> connman/wpa_supplicant delivery advanced AP features.

Well, they are both already sharing the same source code repository.
Whether they will ever be fully merged in a way that there is no option
to build something similar to what is built today is unclear, but
anyway, the main missing part from wpa_supplicant is in providing new
configuration options to take any of the existing hostapd functionality
into use. If there are good use cases for such functions, they can be
added on top of the current wpa_supplicant configuration mechanism.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



More information about the Hostap mailing list