On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Bon sy wrote:

> What's the assumption on the OS and wireless cards for supporting EAL-TLS
> authentication. In other words, any standard compatibility issues on using
> any OS and wireless cards as xsupplicants?
>

This is a quote from MS's page, who just released a 802.1x supplicant for
Win98, ME, NT and 2K:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/bulletins/8021xclient.asp

IEEE 802.1X is an authentication standard that greatly reduces the
security vulnerabilities associated with connections to IEEE 802.11
wireless networks.

IEEE 802.1X authentication uses Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
to exchange messages during the authentication process.

EAP-Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS) is used in certificate-based
security environments. It provides the strongest authentication and key
determination method. EAP-TLS provides mutual authentication, negotiation
of the encryption method, and encrypted key determination between the
client and the authenticator.

On the AP, it must be able to contact a RADIUS server, forward the
authentication, then pass the unique encryption key to the client after
the RADIUS servers accepts the client.

On the server side, the RADIUS server has to support the EAP method of
authentication, and the specific subset of EAP (TLS in this case) as well.
freeradius does this (as long as it's compiled with a beta version of
openssl), and Win2K server (with IAS) does this.  I am not aware of any
other "free" (as in either built-in or GPL) implementation.

As for compatibility, I had problems when using Win2K SP2 with IAS with
WinXP client, but that was a few month ago.  I tried to compile freeradius
along with openssl-0.9.6c, but apparently only 0.9.7 can support the EAP
TLS method.  There is a way to install openssl unstable for the purpose of
linking against freeradius, but I'm not sure I want to do that yet.

Kevin "Starfox" Arima

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