This might seem like an inside-baseball story, with a company releasing an embedded software package for hardware manufacturers: In fact, Devicescape's Secure Wireless Client 1.0 (SWC) software should help enable more robust security on Wi-Fi appliances and portables. The package includes WPA and WPA2 in both personal and enterprise (802.1X) flavors with the full array of EAP methods required for Wi-Fi Alliance certification.

Devicescape sells this software package to manufacturers of Wi-Fi-including equipment that need a security module for allowing users to join wireless networks that doesn't have a big memory footprint. The first generation of Wi-Fi appliances have an erratic track record for security support: some include WPA Personal, some just WEP, and some a full suite.

Glenn Flinchbaugh, Devicescape's VP of marketing, said in an interview, "They don't often have the best security and they're a bit hard to use." He noted that early VoIP over Wi-Fi (VoWLAN) handsets are "kind of cumbersome to get on the network."

Flinchbaugh said that Devicescape's 1.0 product will still require some initial process to enter a security key, but that it will support storing keys for multiple network, something many devices lack. "If you move around and connect to a network you've connected to before, it will remember the security settings and automatically connect," he said.

The company is eager to see a push-button or simplified personal security approach to crystallize and plans to support whatever the Wi-Fi Alliance finalizes around. Flinchbaugh expects a mandatory method that requires the entry of a PIN (an out-of-band confirmation step for key exchange), as well as optional methods that allow push-button initiation with a central gateway.

Devicescape's advantage in the embedded market, Flinchbaugh said, comes from a history in the field that's allowed them to reduce the size of the Wi-Fi software stack to a fairly tiny size. He pointed out that Windows XP's WPA2 client is 70 MB, and that a typical OpenSSL package for SSL/TLS sessions could require 1 MB. The SSL component that Devicescape licenses and integrates is 100 K.

Flinchbaugh pointed out that WPA2 support has lagged in embedded devices because the AES encryption method that's mandatory for certification has a higher toll on processors, requiring more expensive chips. "They can't get the bill of materials cost to where they need it to be with AES encryption," he said. "We're embedded specialists, so we understand all the issues about weird operating systems and weird microprocessors and small amounts of memory."

The appliance market is definitely heating up, as one can tell from a recent spate of product announcements for audio players, handhelds, and cameras. Flinchbaugh said that printers are a very popular category as well.

Devicescape has plans to release even better software that will use existing standards and a proprietary method to make it even simpler to create a secure connection next year, but for now, they're hoping to push this package out to make it easier for consumers and businesses to use the most robust security available.

Pricing starts at $50,000 per project. The software will be integrated into the Wi-Fi Alliance test bed for easier certification. The company has already validated its package against Atheros, Broadcom, and Marvell chips, and can plug right into Windows CE 5.0, Windows Mobile 5.0, and embedded Linux.