MACsec Intel® FPGA System Design User Guide

ID 767516
Date 3/31/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

6.4.5. WPA Supplicant

Figure 34. MACsec Stack with MKA

The wpa_supplicant supports the MACsec Key Agreement (MKA) protocol which is used to set up the required secure channels and associations and to perform key exchanges between different MACsec peers.

In the above diagram, the wpa_supplicant is used for:
  1. Key management and re-generation purpose.
  2. Configure control path.

Initially, authentication exchanges are done using the EAPoL packets. The wpa_supplicant constructs the MKPDU and uses a raw_packet socket interface to send the Tx EAPol announcement to the Ethernet driver. The Ethernet driver forwards these packets to the ring buffer and eventually over the network.

Once a MACsec peer acknowledges the received Tx announcement, it sends the Rx EAPol packet. The Ethernet driver receives these packets. The Ethernet driver allocates an skb and hands over the packet to the wpa_supplicant. The wpa_supplicant decodes the packet and validates whether a potential peer sends it or a new MKPDU frame does it.