Building wpa_supplicant in windows using cygwin and mingw

This howto is a step by step guide that explains how to compile wpa_supplicant in windows using cygwin and mingw.

1. Install cygwin

Cygwin is a unix like environment for Windows. It provides a shell through which unix command line tools such as cat, sed, awk, make, etc can be invoked. Cygwin can be obtained from here. The installation process is straight forward. You need to make sure that you have GNU make.

2. Install mingw

MinGW is a compiler with includes header files and libraries that allows building native windows applications. The MinGW compiler can be downloaded from here.

After you install mingw, make sure that the path to mingw binaries is in the Path of your cygwin shell. You can check this by tying the following in your cygwin shell.

echo $PATH

3. Install WinPcap

Download WinPcap from here and unpack it.

4. Build wpa_supplicant

Download wpa_supplicant source files from here, unpack them.

Create a .config file as follows :

CFLAGS += -I path/to/WinPcap/Include
LIBS += -Lpath/to/WinPcap/Lib/
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE=y
CONFIG_DRIVER_NDIS=y
CONFIG_NATIVE_WINDOWS=y
CONFIG_ELOOP=eloop_win
CONFIG_OS=win32
CONFIG_EAP_MD5=y
CC=mingw32-gc

For now we are just compiling EAP-MD5. In a future update, I will explain how to add support for other methods, which require using OpenSSL.