On Apr 15, 2013, at 11:34 AM, "Williams, Mr. Michael" <mmwilli...@tarleton.edu> wrote:
> One of our wireless networks is configured to use WPA/WPA2 with 802.1x and > PEAP w/ MSCHAP v2. After updating the server certificate on the ACS, our > wireless users were asked to verify or validate the server certificate before > gaining access to the wireless network. […] > I know we are not the only one seeing this requirements, numerous other > University have publish wireless tutorials asking their user to verify the > certificate as part of the initial setup of the wireless profile. […] > > Has anyone found a solution to this problem? Or is this just the default > behavior of the supplicant that we are seeing? > I believe this is by design, not a bug, as there is no automatic way for the client to associate the server's certificate with a particular 802.1x SSID. Only the user can do that, so it means your users need to know what server they should authenticate to. (Conversely, when you go to an https website at a particular domain, the browser can check that the certificate matches the domain.) On campus, we use eduroam, and our users need to accept the certificate for our server when they first connect. We try to teach them that they should not ever need to accept another certificate until we update ours, which we will let them know about ahead of time via email. So, after the initial setup here, if they ever try to join an eduroam AP, and get prompted about the server's certificate, they should cancel the connection so their device doesn't send their credentials to bogus server. This is the only defense against, say, a student setting up their own RADIUS box with an AP to broadcast as eduroam and then harvesting usernames and passwords. Unchecking the "validate certificate" option on Windows removes your user's only defense agains such situations. Unfortunately, from what I've found, Android devices doing PEAP/MSCHAPv2 do not prompt for certificate, so with them, you don't get a chance to verify the server. Steve Bohrer Network Admin, ITS Bard College at Simon's Rock 413-528-7645 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
