running hostapd on wired machine

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Thu Dec 4 00:39:51 EST 2003


On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 11:50:29PM -0500, Kunal Trivedi wrote:

> "Is it possible to run hostapd on wired machine ? or bind hostapd to
> wired interface ?"

No, that cannot be done with the current version. You could try
another implementation of IEEE 802.1X Authenticator (open1x.org) which
is not tightly coupled with IEEE 802.11 management.

> We would like to authenticate wireless users but AP does not have 802.1x
> functionality.
> hostapd code seems to be using some information from kernel driver.

Yes, hostapd code would need to be modified to add station entries based
on EAPOL-Start (or any other signal from the AP, if available) instead
of IEEE 802.11 association. In addition, you might want to configure
some kind of filtering based on the authorization status of each device
(MAC address).

Then again, this kind of mode is quite limited since you cannot use
dynamic encryption keys and stations can quite easily change their MAC
address and pretend to be another user..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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