Hi Denis,
-----Original Message-----
From: Denis Kenzior <denkenz(a)gmail.com>
Sent: 25 April 2020 05:04
To: Diego Santa Cruz <Diego.SantaCruz(a)spinetix.com>; iwd(a)lists.01.org
Subject: Re: Compatibility problems with wired 802.1x
Hi Diego,
<snip>
Sorry for the (very) late reply, I just noticed this message sitting in my Junk folder...
I have you whitelisted now.
>> Hmm, its been a while since I looked into ead. On the iwd
side we
>> default to replying with the same protocol version as the request, but
>> looks like ead does indeed hard-code 2004 as the version.
>>
>
> In ead context I think there is not always something to reply to, the
EAPPOL-Start message is sent unsolicited, so there is no request to look at to
get the version. That may explain why it is hardcoded.
Yes, with WiFi it is a bit simpler because 95% of the time the AP sends
us a RequestIdentity right away with a protocol version set. So we just
use that one. However, there have been instances where even this
strategy fails. For example, Time Warner / Spectrum hotspots send a
RequestIdentity with 2004 version, but refuse to process any packets
unless they're sent with 2001 version. We do send EAPOL-Start with 2001
in iwd, but for some reason ead uses 2004.
Ah! I guess the adage "do whatever Windows does" ensures best compatibility,
probably that the AP QA is often like "if it works with Windows then all is
good" despite the Wi-Fi alliance efforts. Well now ead uses 2001 so I hope that works
out well with all switches.
<snip>
>> Yes, indeed it should. I suspect the reason is that it sort of just
>> happened to work even when the operstate wasn't set properly, but this
>> should be fixed.
>>
>
> I have second thoughts about this. At least in the switch I am playing with, it
can be configured so that an unauthenticated supplicant is put into a guest
VLAN and one which fails authentication into an auth-fail VLAN (but my guess
is that this is pretty common functionality). If ead were to put the link into
dormant state until authentication succeeded it would mean daemons that
look at the link's running flag would not attempt to communicate before
authentication succeeded (e.g., DHCP client), thus loosing the possibility to
use the guest or auth-fail VLAN.
This area is tricky and not very well documented (on Linux and in
general) At least according to
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/operstates.txt,
dhcp
daemons expect the supplicant to take the interface out of dormant mode
as a hint that DHCP requests can now be sent. So ideally,
EAP-RequestIdentity should trigger the interface going into OPER_DORMANT
mode. And EAP-Success should trigger it going into OPER_UP.
But, the complication is that there are implementations that send
RequestIdentity / reply to EAPoL-Start only after the initial DHCP
Discover has been sent out. This is a big reason why we think it makes
sense to put dhcp right into ead eventually.
I suspect ead will need to try to auto-detect (or have the user
configure) if this 'guest-vlan' type scenario is supported. And if it
isn't, leave the interface in OPER_DORMANT state.
As far as I have been able to test the current situation in ead works well in practice, so
I am not sure adding complexity (implementation and configuration) to handle setting the
interface into dormant state and back up is probably not needed. We will be including ead
in the next firmware release for our products to add 802.1x support so it will get wider
testing, I will come back if we notice any problems.
Best,
Diego
--
Diego Santa Cruz, PhD
Technology Architect
spinetix.com