The WPA supplicant

Wireless tools are very useful for simple settings. However, for normal usage, they are not enough. In fact, in a normal wireless connection, we have to use some sort of encryption in order to protect our data that flows through the air! To do it, we need special tools for each mode of functioning discussed earlier. As an example, we will show how we can set up a station on our Wandboard using the WPA as an encryption method.

When acting as a station, that is, as a computer that wishes to get connected to a wireless network having an authentication protocol, we need a wireless supplicant. A supplicant is a program that is responsible for making login requests to a wireless network by passing the login and encryption credentials to the authentication server (that is, the access point). A good wireless supplicant for GNU/Linux-based systems is the tool named WPA-Supplicant, which can be easily installed in our Debian by getting the wpasupplicant package.

Note

WPA stands for...