Dear Dr. Pala,

On 2/12/19 7:36 PM, Dr. Pala wrote:

Hi all,

I am working on a draft for credentials management via EAP. When looking at the 
different specifications, it seems a bit weird that EAP does not provide 
Fragmentation control and requires each method to define their own way.

This, led me to my first question: is there a de-facto "standard" way to add 
Fragmentation support we can just use (without having to re-invent the wheel 
all the time) ? If we had such a mechanism, then we could just say "implement 
the mechanism as defined in ... ". This would definitely help developers that 
could safely re-use code/libraries. The other approach would be to modify EAP 
to add Fragmentation support there. The main reason to have a standard behavior 
is to have also better management for ack and nak packets. As far as the 
solution goes, the main ones I looked at are the ones mentioned in EAP-TTLS and 
EAP-TEAP. They are both practically the same, active ACK-based - are there 
other methods that have been implemented ? Has anybody ever looked at how 
fragmentation is handled in practice and if there are better solutions than 
others ?

No hat: I think having a standard mechanism for supporting large messages and 
fragmentation independently of any particular EAP method would definitely be 
something useful. As you said, it would allow developers to safely re-use code. 
If you have a draft proposal, I would be happy to review it. Perhaps we could 
start by looking at existing mechanisms used by EAP-Pwd/EAP-TTLS.

--Mohit

Further thinking let me to my second question: the method we are going to 
propose requires some form of authentication for the server, therefore I can 
see its use mainly as a tunneled method where the communication with the server 
is assumed to be already secure. If we go down the route of requiring the use 
of an outer method that provides authenticity and, optionally, confidentiality 
we would also not need to provide support for Fragmentation control, since the 
records would be encapsulated within the outer-method messages that already 
provide fragmentation support. Would this be acceptable ? Or should the method 
not have such assumptions and provide support for explicit fragmentation 
control ? What would be the preferred path here ? I personally would like to 
have a method that could be used independently, but I would also like to focus 
on simplicity of implementation so that if you already have EAP-TTLS/EAP-TEAP 
support, adding support for EAP-CREDS would be very simple.

Looking forward to some great guidance and advice :D Also, if you would like to 
collaborate/contribute, please let me know!

--
Best Regards,
Massimiliano Pala, Ph.D.
OpenCA Labs Director
[OpenCA Logo]



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