802.11i authentication, if enabled, provides mutual authentication, but that's only between the client and the _home_ network. You know that the home network trusts the access network because it was given the session key, but you have no idea if the access network is, say, CheapAccessInc or WorldsMostExpensiveRoamingCorp.

There are extensions of network access authentication methods where you also get some form of an authenticated identity for the access network. 3GPP LTE access authentication or EAP-AKA', for instance. Not yet widely deployed, of course.

(But I'm digressing from the original stop.)

Jari

Ralph Droms wrote:
Yup ... there is currently no way to provide authenticated, meaningful identification of the network(s) to which a host is attached. Without that identification, it's pretty hard to write any reasonable policies.

- Ralph

On Apr 16, 2009, at 1:26 PM 4/16/09, Ted Lemon wrote:

On 2009/4/13 Ralph Droms <rdr...@cisco.com> wrote:
For example, would a host process
information received from a Starbucks network over its 802.11
interface differently from information received a home network over the 802.11 interface?

It's even more fun than that. How do we reliably know that we are at Starbucks, and not at home? The SSID? That's not an authenticated token. Currently Windows makes security decisions based on the SSID. You could call this the best answer they could come up with for a problem with no good answers. Or you could say that it instills the user with a false sense of security. Either way, it's not something I'd be comfortable seeing in a protocol spec, so if the client is in fact to make decisions as you've suggested, we'd need a secure way of doing this. I don't know enough about WPA Enterprise to know if there's a bidirectional authentication going on there - from the UI perspective it looks like it's one-way.


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