Can you provide any additional information as to why the use of eduroam is 
prohibited?
Regarding local campus use, it was an opinion by university legal counsel— I 
have nothing more add.  (and this is not a listserv for legal experts)

I can comment on security for UT Austin’s use of eduroam elsewhere, and that 
would be an appropriate conversation for this list.  It is related to how our 
university has implemented credentials and wireless authentication that may not 
apply at many other institutions.

1)  Wireless at UT Austin may only be accessed via 802.1x at present, and the 
only EAP method supported is PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2.  MSCHAPv2 has 
vulnerabilities.  As long as the RADIUS infrastructure is operated securely by 
the university, we do not believe this is much of an exposure.  eduroam, 
however, is a confederation of thousands of RADIUS servers, none of which are 
operated by the university.  We think some of those could be compromised, 
providing access to exploit MSCHAPv2 weaknesses.

2)  The credential is same one used for “consistent sign-on” for almost all 
university services.  Additional factors are being added to a number of 
services, but compromise of the single credential would still be very bad.

3)  We know about alternative EAP methods, such as certificates.  It is a tool 
we would like for other use cases and benefits.  But that has not be 
prioritized for resources to date (please insert long-tail time and money here).

4)  It has been our experience that PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2 is the path of least 
resistance on the most popular platforms.  A different credential or 
alternative EAP methods for regular campus use would create too much friction 
when connecting (your campus may be different).  Yes, we are aware of current 
on-boarding products — and we use some of them.  At some point the security 
environment may change (it usually does) tipping in favor of other methods.  
Along the way native OS support may improve for other methods obviating need 
for an on-boarding step by our community (wouldn’t that be swell), or 
on-boarding tools may become better and less cumbersome.



-William

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