I won't argue for or against TLS or for other methods without understanding the 
context and use case…  What fits the risk/benefit/cost profile for a particular 
community or subset?  Observationally, eduroam reports show only 5% of visitors 
to our university utilizing TLS.

We labbed up the MITM in 2006 as part of our  802.1x deployment work (having 
concerns).  I continue to hope for better EAP implementations in the native OS 
(shouts at the heavens).

On other notes, I am disappointed in the slow rollout of WPA3 (I know there 
have been security issues).  Sometimes these features are so slow they are 
overtaken by other solutions.  For example, while we do block some services on 
our open guest SSID to discourage our community from using it, we’ve learned 
how Android will VPN tunnel through Google’s servers (unbeknownst/configured by 
the user) obviating these attempts on our part.  I guess it does secure those 
users on from any threats on those open networks and whoever operate them 
(Google, *deleted*).



William Green, Director of Networking and Telecommunications
The University of Texas at Austin | ITS | 512-475-9295 | 
it.utexas.edu<https://www.utexas.edu> | 
[email protected]<https://www.utexas.edu>


“Most need no instructions and figure it out on their own,” may not be the 
virtue you think it is.  How many of these users figuring it out on their own 
are validating your RADIUS server certs?  Self-configuration invites MiM 
attacks that can harvest account credentials.  It’s precisely the security 
weakness of 1x I cautioned about earlier.

Furthermore, providing an onboarding option that configures the devices 
correctly doesn’t prevent users from self-configuring.  A good on-boarding 
solution will be widely used and will reduce the overall risk, but it doesn’t 
eliminate the problem.  TLS is the only EAP type that doesn’t have this 
weakness.

Chuck


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