hostapd is a user space daemon for access point and authentication servers. It implements IEEE 802.11 access point management, IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP Authenticators and RADIUS authentication server. The current version supports Linux (Host AP, madwifi, mac80211-based drivers) and FreeBSD (net80211).

hostapd is designed to be a "daemon" program that runs in the background and acts as the backend component controlling authentication.

hostapd supports separate frontend programs and an example text-based frontend, hostapd_cli, is included with hostapd.