2022-08-23
Testing with radius and 802.1x authentication on wifi
For work I am looking into how Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) actually works down to the byte level, to be able to explain what actually happens and where the security strenghts and weaknesses are. To set this up I need a separation between the access-point and the authentication server. I dug up an old Asus WL300g access-point and looked at FreeRADIUS as authentication, authorization and auditing (AAA) server. I followed the A very basic (but functional) eduroam configuration - FreeRADIUS wiki guide to get to a working setup, but with different passwords. Getting the access-point to talk to a radius server took a bit of searching and trying: I assumed that "802.1x" which is extended to "Radius with 802.1x" was the right mode to use a radius server in the background, but it turned out this didn't do what I want. I saw no communication with the radius server and I didn't see the SSID advertised. The right mode is "WPA" and things started to work that way. It still needs a few settings to talk to the radius server: IP address, port and shared secret. I chose to go the 'eduroam' way because that is what I am used to from work. This does mean I had to set a home domain idefix.net for authentication. With eduroam I also get Extensible Authentication Protol (EAP) extensions to handle with the real user data. The result is an outer authentication layer visible to the first radius server in the path and an inner authentication layer only visible to the final radius server in the path. Although both the outer and the inner authentication servers run on the same freeradius server they are separate configurations with a trust relation between them. The traffic to the inner authentication server is wrapped in TLS and needs a certificate. I used LetsEncrypt to generate a trusted certificate. I noticed I am at a point where generating a valid LetsEncrypt certificate was easier for me than fiddling with self-signed certificates. So I could set up my phone to require a valid certificate for radius.idefix.net. All of this worked and I had a WPA Enterprise connection with the access-point and a lot of debug logging in freeradius. My next plan is to find some computer with a network card where I can run wpa_supplicant while at the same time grabbing all the raw 802.11 frames and analyzing/understanding the traffic. I will also look at the radius traffic between access-point and outer radius server, and the radius traffic between outer and inner radius server.