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The eduroam architecture for network roaming
draft-wierenga-ietf-eduroam-03

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 7593.
Expired & archived
Authors Klaas Wierenga , Stefan Winter , Tomasz Wolniewicz
Last updated 2014-08-18 (Latest revision 2014-02-14)
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draft-wierenga-ietf-eduroam-03
Network Working Group                                        K. Wierenga
Internet-Draft                                             Cisco Systems
Intended status: Informational                                 S. Winter
Expires: August 18, 2014                                         RESTENA
                                                           T. Wolniewicz
                                          Nicolaus Copernicus University
                                                       February 14, 2014

              The eduroam architecture for network roaming
                   draft-wierenga-ietf-eduroam-03.txt

Abstract

   This document describes the architecture of the eduroam service for
   federated (wireless) network access in academia.  The combination of
   IEEE 802.1X, EAP and RADIUS that is used in eduroam provides a
   secure, scalable and deployable service for roaming network access.
   The successful deployment of eduroam over the last decade in the
   educational sector may serve as an example for other sectors, hence
   this document.  In particular the initial architectural and standards
   choices and the changes that were prompted by operational experience
   are highlighted.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 18, 2014.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents

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   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.1.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  Notational Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.3.  Design Goals  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     1.4.  Solutions that were considered  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   2.  Classic Architecture  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.1.  Authentication  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       2.1.1.  IEEE 802.1X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       2.1.2.  EAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     2.2.  Federation Trust Fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       2.2.1.  RADIUS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   3.  Issues with initial Trust Fabric  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     3.1.  Server Failure Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     3.2.  No error condition signalling . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     3.3.  Routing table complexity  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     3.4.  UDP Issues  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     3.5.  Insufficient payload encryption and EAP server validation  14
   4.  New Trust Fabric  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
     4.1.  RADIUS with TLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
     4.2.  Dynamic Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
       4.2.1.  Discovery of responsible server . . . . . . . . . . .  18
       4.2.2.  Verifying server authorisation  . . . . . . . . . . .  19
       4.2.3.  Operational Experience  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
       4.2.4.  Possible Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
   5.  Abuse prevention and incident handling  . . . . . . . . . . .  20
     5.1.  Incident Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
     5.2.  Operator Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  22
     5.3.  Chargeable User Identity  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  23
   6.  Privacy Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  24
     6.1.  Collusion of Service Providers  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  24
     6.2.  Exposing user credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  24
     6.3.  Track location of users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  24
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  25
     7.1.  Man in the middle and Tunneling Attacks . . . . . . . . .  25
       7.1.1.  Verification of Server Name not supported . . . . . .  25
       7.1.2.  Neither Specification of CA nor Server Name checks
               during bootstrap  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  25
       7.1.3.  User does not configure CA or Server Name checks  . .  26

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       7.1.4.  Tunneling authentication traffic to obfuscate user
               origin  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  26
     7.2.  Denial of Service Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  27
       7.2.1.  Intentional DoS by malign individuals . . . . . . . .  27
       7.2.2.  DoS as a side-effect of expired credentials . . . . .  28
   8.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  29
   9.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  29
     9.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  29
     9.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  30
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33
   Appendix B.  Changes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33

1.  Introduction

   In 2002 the European Research and Education community set out to
   create a network roaming service for students and employees in
   academia [eduroam-start].  Now over 10 years later this service has
   grown to more than 10.000 service locations, serving millions of
   users on all continents with the exception of Antarctica.

   This memo serves to explain the considerations for the design of
   eduroam as well as to document operational experience and resulting
   changes that led to IETF standardization effort like RADIUS over TCP
   [RFC6613] and RADIUS with TLS [RFC6614] and that promoted alternative
   uses of RADIUS like in ABFAB [I-D.ietf-abfab-arch].  Whereas the
   eduroam service is limited to academia, the eduroam architecture can
   easily be reused in other environments.

   First this memo describes the original architecture of eduroam.  Then
   a number of operational problems are presented that surfaced when
   eduroam gained wide-scale deployment.  Lastly, enhancements to the
   eduroam architecture that mitigate the aforementioned issues are
   discussed.

1.1.  Terminology

   This document uses identity management and privacy terminology from
   [RFC6973].  In particular, this document uses the terms Identity
   Provider, Service Provider and identity management.

1.2.  Notational Conventions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

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   Note: Also the policy that eduroam participants subscribe to,
   expresses the requirements for participation in RFC 2119 language.

1.3.  Design Goals

   The guiding design considerations for eduroam were as follows:

   - Unique identification of users at the edge of the network

   The access Service Provider (SP) needs to be able to determine
   whether a user is authorized to use the network resources.
   Furthermore, in case of abuse of the resources, there is a
   requirement to be able to identify the user uniquely (with the
   cooperation of the user's Identity Provider (IdP) operator).

   - Enable (trusted) guest use

   In order to enable roaming it should be possible for users of
   participating institutions to get seamless access to the networks of
   other institutions.

   Note: traffic separation between guest users and normal users is
   possible (for example through the use of VLANs), and indeed widely
   used in eduroam.

   - Scalable

   The infrastructure that is created should scale to a large number of
   users and organizations without requiring a lot of coordination and
   other administrative procedures (possibly with the exception of an
   initial set up).  Specifically, it should not be necessary for a user
   that visits another organization to go through an administrative
   process.

   - Easy to install and use

   It should be easy for both organizations and users to participate in
   the roaming infrastructure as that may otherwise inhibit wide scale
   adoption.  In particular, there should be no or easy client
   installation and only one-off configuration.

   - Secure

   An important design criterion has been that there needs to be a
   security association between the end-user and their Identity
   Provider, eliminating the possibility of credentials theft.  The
   minimal requirements for security are specified in the eduroam policy
   and subject to change over time.  As an additional protection against

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   user errors and negligence, it should be possible for participating
   organizations to set their own additional requirements for the
   quality of authentication of users without the need for the
   infrastructure as a whole to implement the same standard.

   - Privacy preserving

   The design of the system should provide for user anonymization, i.e.
   a possibility to hide the user's identity from any third parties,
   including Service Providers.

   - Standards based

   In an infrastructure in which many thousands of organizations
   participate it is obvious that it should be possible to use equipment
   from different vendors, therefore it is important to base the
   infrastructure on open standards.

1.4.  Solutions that were considered

   Three architectures were trialed: one based on the use of VPN-
   technology (deemed secure but not-scalable), one Web captive-portal
   based (scalable but not secure) and IEEE 802.1X-based, the latter
   being the basis of what is now the eduroam architecture
   ([nrenroaming-select]).

   The chosen architecture is based on:

   o  IEEE 802.1X ([dot1X-standard]) as port based authentication
      framework using

   o  EAP ([RFC3748]) for integrity and confidentially protected
      transport of credentials and a

   o  RADIUS ([RFC2865]) hierarchy as trust fabric.

2.  Classic Architecture

   Federations, like eduroam, implement essentially two types of direct
   trust relations (and one indirect).  The trust relation between an
   end-user and the IdP (operated by the home organization of the user)
   and between the IdP and the SP (in eduroam the operator of the
   network at the visited location).  In eduroam the trust relation
   between user and IdP is through mutual authentication.  IdPs and SP
   establish trust through the use of a RADIUS hierarchy.

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   These two forms of trust relations in turn provide the transitive
   trust relation that makes the SP trust the user to use its network
   resources.

2.1.  Authentication

   Authentication in eduroam is achieved by using a combination of IEEE
   802.1X [dot1X-standard] and EAP [RFC4372] (the latter carried over
   RADIUS, see below).

2.1.1.  IEEE 802.1X

   By using the IEEE 802.1X [dot1X-standard] framework for port-based
   network authentication, organizations that offer network access (SPs)
   for visiting (and local) eduroam users can make sure that only
   authorized users get access.  The user (or rather the user's
   supplicant) sends an access request to the authenticator (wireless
   access point or switch) at the SP, the authenticator forwards the
   access request to the authentication server of the SP which in turn
   proxies the request through the RADIUS hierarchy to the
   authentication server of the user's home organization (the IdP, see
   below).

   Note: The security of the connections between local wireless
   infrastructure and local RADIUS servers is a part of the local
   network of each SP, therefore it is out of scope for this document.
   For completeness it should be stated that security between access
   points and their controllers is vendor specific, security between
   controllers (or standalone access points) and local RADIUS servers is
   based on the typical RADIUS shared secret mechanism.

   In order for users to be aware of the availability of the eduroam
   service, an SP that offers wireless network access MUST broadcast the
   SSID 'eduroam', unless that conflicts with the SSID of another
   eduroam SP, in which case an SSID starting with "eduroam-" MAY be
   used.  The downside of the latter is that clients will not
   automatically connect to that SSID, thus losing the seamless
   connection experience.

   Note: A direct implication of the common eduroam SSID is that the
   users cannot distinguish between a connection to the home network and
   a guest network at another eduroam institution (IEEE 802.11-2012 does
   have the so-called "Interworking" extensions to make that
   distinction, but these are not widely implemented yet).  Therefore,
   users should be made aware that they should not assume data
   confidentiality in the eduroam infrastructure.

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   To protect over-the-air user data confidentiality, IEEE 802.11
   wireless networks of eduroam SP's MUST deploy WPA2+AES, and MAY
   additionally support WPA/TKIP as a courtesy to users of legacy
   hardware.

2.1.2.  EAP

   The use of the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) [RFC4372]
   serves 2 purposes.  In the first place a properly chosen EAP-method
   allows for integrity and confidentiality protected transport of the
   user credentials to the home organization.  Secondly, by having all
   RADIUS servers transparently proxy access requests regardless of the
   EAP-method inside the RADIUS packet, the choice of EAP-method is
   between the 'home' organization of the user and the user, in other
   words, in principle every authentication form that can be carried
   inside EAP can be used in eduroam, as long as they adhere to minimal
   requirements as set forth in the eduroam Service Definition
   [eduroam-service-definition].

                               +-----+
                              /       \
                             /         \
                            /           \
                           /             \
          ,----------\    |               |   ,---------\
          |    SP    |    |    eduroam    |   |    IdP  |
          |          +----+  trust fabric +---+         |
          `------+---'    |               |   '-----+---'
                 |        |               |         |
                 |         \             /          |
                 |          \           /           |
                 |           \         /            |
                 |            \       /             |
            +----+             +-----+              +----+
            |                                            |
            |                                            |
        +---+--+                                      +--+---+
        |      |                                      |      |
      +-+------+-+    ___________________________     |      |
      |          |   O__________________________ )    +------+
      +----------+
      Host (supplicant)      EAP tunnel       Authentication server

                          Figure 1: Tunneled EAP

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   Proxying of access requests is based on the outer identity in the
   EAP-message.  Those outer identities MUST be of the form
   something@realm, where the realm part is the domain name of the
   domain that the IdP belongs to.  In order to preserve credentials
   protection, participating organizations MUST deploy EAP-methods that
   provide mutual authentication.  For EAP methods that support outer
   identity, anonymous outer identities are recommended.  Most commonly
   used in eduroam are the so-called tunneled EAP-methods, that first
   create a server authenticated TLS tunnel through which the user
   credentials are transmitted.  As depicted in Figure 1, the use of a
   tunneled EAP-method creates a direct logical connection between the
   supplicant and the authentication server, even though the actual
   traffic flows through the RADIUS-hierarchy.

2.2.  Federation Trust Fabric

   The eduroam federation trust fabric is based on RADIUS.  RADIUS trust
   is based on shared secrets between RADIUS peers.  In eduroam any
   RADIUS message originating from a trusted peer is implicitly assumed
   to originate from a member of the roaming consortium.

2.2.1.  RADIUS

   The eduroam trust fabric consists of a proxy hierarchy of RADIUS
   servers (organizational, national, global), loosely based on the DNS
   hierarchy.  That is, typically an organizational RADIUS server agrees
   on a shared secret with a national server and the national server in
   turn agrees on a shared secret with the root server.  Access requests
   are routed through a chain of RADIUS proxies towards the Identity
   Provider of the user, and the access accept (or reject) follows the
   same path back.

   Note: In some circumstances there are more levels of RADIUS servers,
   like for example regional or continental servers, but that doesn't
   change the general model.  Also, the packet exchange that is
   described below requires in reality several round-trips.

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                                  +-------+
                                  |       |
                                  |   .   |
                                  |       |
                                  +---+---+
                                    / | \
                  +----------------/  |  \---------------------+
                  |                   |                        |
                  |                   |                        |
                  |                   |                        |
               +--+---+            +--+--+                +----+---+
               |      |            |     |                |        |
               | .edu |    . . .   | .nl |      . . .     | .ac.uk |
               |      |            |     |                |        |
               +--+---+            +--+--+                +----+---+
                / | \                 | \                      |
               /  |  \                |  \                     |
              /   |   \               |   \                    |
       +-----+    |    +-----+        |    +------+            |
       |          |          |        |           |            |
       |          |          |        |           |            |
   +---+---+ +----+---+ +----+---+ +--+---+ +-----+----+ +-----+-----+
   |       | |        | |        | |      | |          | |           |
   |utk.edu| |utah.edu| |case.edu| |hva.nl| |surfnet.nl| |soton.ac.uk|
   |       | |        | |        | |      | |          | |           |
   +----+--+ +--------+ +--------+ +------+ +----+-----+ +-----------+
        |                                        |
        |                                        |
     +--+--+                                  +--+--+
     |     |                                  |     |
   +-+-----+-+                                |     |
   |         |                                +-----+
   +---------+
   user: paul@surfnet.nl             surfnet.nl Authentication server

                    Figure 2: eduroam RADIUS hierarchy

   Routing of access requests to the home IdP is done based on the realm
   part of the outer identity.  For example (see: Figure 2), when user
   paul@surfnet.nl of SURFnet (surfnet.nl) tries to gain wireless
   network access at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (utk.edu)
   the following happens:

   o  Paul's supplicant transmits an EAP access request to the Access
      Point (Authenticator) at UTK with outer identity say
      anonymous@surfnet.nl

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   o  The Access Point forwards the EAP message to its Authentication
      Server (the UTK RADIUS server)

   o  The UTK RADIUS server checks the realm to see if it is a local
      realm, since it isn't the request is proxied to the .edu RADIUS
      server

   o  The .edu RADIUS server verifies the realm, and since it is not a
      in a .edu subdomain it proxies the request to the root server

   o  The root RADIUS server proxies the request to the .nl RADIUS
      server

   o  The .nl RADIUS server proxies the request to the surfnet.nl server

   o  The surfnet.nl RADIUS server decapsulates the EAP message and
      verifies the user credentials

   o  The surfnet.nl RADIUS server informs the utk.edu server of the
      outcome of the authentication request (Access-Accept or Access-
      Reject) by proxying the outcome through the RADIUS hierarchy in
      reverse order.

   o  The UTK RADIUS server instructs the UTK Access Point to either
      accept or reject access based on the outcome of the
      authentication.

   Note: The depiction of the root RADIUS server is a simplification.
   In reality the root server is distributed over 3 continents and each
   maintains a list of the top level realms that a specific root server
   is responsible for.  This also means that, for intercontinental
   roaming, there is an extra proxy step from one root server to the
   other.

3.  Issues with initial Trust Fabric

   While the hierarchical RADIUS architecture described in the previous
   section has served as the basis for eduroam operations for an entire
   decade, the exponential growth of authentications is expected to lead
   to, and has in fact in some cases already led to, performance and
   operations bottlenecks on the aggregation proxies.  The following
   sections describe some of the shortcomings, and the resulting
   remedies.

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3.1.  Server Failure Handling

   In eduroam, authentication requests for roaming users are statically
   routed through pre-configured proxies.  The number of proxies varies:
   in a national roaming case, the number of proxies is typically 1 or 2
   (some countries deploy regional proxies, which are in turn aggregated
   by a national proxy); in international roaming, 3 or 4 proxy servers
   are typically involved (the number may be higher along some routes).

   RFC2865 [RFC2865] does not define a failover algorithm.  In
   particular, the failure of a server needs to be deduced from the
   absence of a reply.  Operational experience has shown that this has
   detrimental effects on the infrastructure and end user experience:

   1.  Authentication failure: the first user whose authentication path
       is along a newly-failed server will experience a long delay and
       possibly timeout

   2.  Wrongly deduced states: since the proxy chain is longer than 1
       hop, a failure further along in the authentication path is
       indistinguishable from a failure in the next hop.

   3.  Inability to determine recovery of a server: only a "live"
       authentication request sent to a server which is believed
       inoperable can lead to the discovery that the server is in
       working order again.  This issue has been resolved with RFC5997
       [RFC5997].

   The second point can have significant impact on the operational state
   of the system in a worst-case scenario: Imagine one realm's home
   server being inoperable.  A user from that realm is trying to roam
   internationally and tries to authenticate.  The RADIUS server on the
   hotspot location will assume its own national proxy is down, because
   it does not reply.  That national server, being perfectly alive, in
   turn will assume that the international aggregation proxy is down;
   which in turn will believe the home country proxy national server is
   down.  None of these assumptions are true.  Worse yet: should any of
   these servers trigger a failover to a redundant backup RADIUS server,
   it will still not receive a reply, because the request will still be
   routed to the same defunct home server.  Within a short time, all
   redundant aggregation proxies might be considered defunct by their
   preceding hop.

   In the absence of proper next-hop state derivation, some interesting
   concepts have been introduced by eduroam participants; the most
   noteworthy being a failover logic which considers up/down states not
   per next-hop RADIUS peer, but instead per realm (See [dead-realm] for
   details).  As of recent, RFC5997 [RFC5997] implementations and

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   cautious failover parameters make such a worst-case scenario very
   unlikely to happen, but are still an important issue to consider.

3.2.  No error condition signalling

   The RADIUS protocol lacks signalling of error conditions, and the
   IEEE 802.1X protocol does not allow to convey extended failure
   reasons to the end-user's device.  For eduroam, this creates issues
   in a twofold way:

   o  The home server may have an operational problem, for example if
      its authentication decisions depend on an external data source
      such as ActiveDirectory or an SQL server, and if these external
      dependencies are out of order.  If the RADIUS interface is still
      functional, there are two options how to reply to an Access-
      Request which can't be serviced due to such error conditions:

      1.  Do Not Reply: the inability to reach a conclusion can be
          treated by not replying to the request.  The upside of this
          approach is that the end-user's software doesn't come to wrong
          conclusions and won't give unhelpful hints such as "maybe your
          password is wrong".  The downside is that intermediate proxies
          may come to wrong conclusions because their downstream RADIUS
          server isn't responding.

      2.  Reply with Reject: in this option, the inability to reach a
          conclusion is treated like an authentication failure.  The
          upside of this approach is that intermediate proxies maintain
          a correct view on the reachability state of their RADIUS peer.
          The downside is that EAP supplicants on end-user devices often
          react with either false advice ("your password is wrong") or
          even trigger permanent configuration changes (e.g. the Windows
          built-in supplicant will delete the credential set from its
          registry, prompting the user for their password on the next
          connection attempt).  The latter case of Windows is a source
          of significant helpdesk activity; users may have forgotten
          their password after initially storing it, but are suddenly
          prompted again.

   There have been epic discussions in the eduroam community which of
   the two approaches is more appropriate; but they were not conclusive.

   o  Similar considerations as above apply when an intermediate proxy
      does not receive a reply from a downstream RADIUS server.  The
      proxy may either choose not to reply to the original request,
      leading to retries and its upstream peers coming to wrong
      conclusions about its own availability; or it may decide to reply

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      with Access-Reject to indicate its own liveliness, but again with
      implications for the end user.

   The ability to send Status-Server watchdog requests is only of use
   after the fact, in case a downstream server doesn't reply (or hasn't
   been contacted in a long while, so that it's previous working state
   is stale).  The active link-state monitoring of the TCP connection
   with e.g. RADIUS/TLS (see below) gives a clearer indication whether
   there is an alive RADIUS peer, but does not solve the defunct backend
   problem.  An explicit ability to send Error-Replies, on the RADIUS
   (for other RADIUS peer information) and EAP level (for end-user
   supplicant information), would alleviate these problems but is
   currently not available.

3.3.  Routing table complexity

   The aggregation of RADIUS requests based on the structure of the
   user's realm implies that realms ending with the same top-level
   domain are routed to the same server; i.e. to a common administrative
   domain.  While this is true for country code Top Level Domains
   (ccTLDs), which map into national eduroam federations, it is not true
   for realms residing in generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).  Realms in
   gTLDs were historically discouraged because the automatic mapping
   "realm ending" -> "eduroam federation's server" could not be applied.
   However, with growing demand from eduroam realm administrators, it
   became necessary to create exception entries in the forwarding rules;
   such realms need to be mapped on a realm-by-realm basis to their
   eduroam federations.  Example: "kit.edu" (Karsruher Institut fuer
   Technologie) needs to be routed to the German federation server,
   whereas "iu.edu" (Indiana University) needs to be routed to the USA
   federation server.

   While the ccTLDs occupy only approx. 50 routing entries in total (and
   have a upper bound of approx. 200), the potential size of the routing
   table becomes virtually unlimited if it needs to accomodate all
   individual entries in .edu, .org, etc.

   In addition to that, all these routes need to be synchronised between
   three international root servers, and the updates need to be applied
   manually to RADIUS server configuration files.  The frequency of the
   required updates makes this approach fragile and error-prone as the
   number of entries grows.

3.4.  UDP Issues

   RADIUS is based on UDP, which was a reasonable choice when its main
   use was with simple PAP requests which required only exactly one
   packet exchange in each direction.

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   When transporting EAP over RADIUS, the EAP conversations requires
   multiple round-trips; depending on the total payload size, 8-10
   round-trips are not uncommon.  The loss of a single UDP packet will
   lead to user-visible delays and might result in servers being marked
   as dead due to the absence of a reply.  The proxy path in eduroam
   consists of several proxies, all of which introduce a very small
   packet loss probability; i.e. the more proxies are needed, the higher
   the failure rate is going to be.

   For some EAP types, depending on the exact payload size they carry,
   RADIUS servers and/or supplicants may choose to fill as much EAP data
   into a single RADIUS packet as the supplicant's layer 2 medium allows
   for, typically 1500 Bytes.  In that case, the RADIUS encapsulation
   around the EAP-Message will add more bytes to the overall RADIUS
   payload size and in the end exceed the 1500 Byte limit, leading to
   fragmentation of the UDP datagram on the IP layer.  While this is not
   a problem in theory, practice has shown evidence of misbehaving
   firewalls which erroneously discard non-first UDP fragments, which
   ultimately leads to a denial of service for users with such EAP types
   and that specific configuration.

   One EAP type proved to be particularly problematic: EAP-TLS.  While
   it is possible to configure the EAP server to send smaller chunks of
   EAP payload to the supplicant (e.g. 1200 Bytes, to allow for another
   300 Bytes of RADIUS overhead without fragmentation), very often the
   supplicants which send the client certificate do not expose such a
   configuration detail to the user.  Consequently, when the client
   certificate is beyond 1500 Bytes in size, the EAP-Message will always
   make use of the maximum possible layer-2 chunk size, which introduces
   the fragmentation on the path from EAP peer to EAP server.

   Both of the previously mentioned sources of errors (packet loss,
   fragment discard) lead to significant frustration for the affected
   users.  Operational experience of eduroam shows that such cases are
   hard to debug since they require coordinated cooperation of all
   eduroam administrators on the authentication path.  For that reason
   the eduroam community is developing monitoring tools that help to
   locate fragmentation problems.

3.5.  Insufficient payload encryption and EAP server validation

   The RADIUS protocol's design foresaw only the encryption of select
   RADIUS attributes, most notably User-Password.  With EAP methods
   conforming to the requirements of [RFC4017], the user's credential is
   not transmitted using the User-Password attribute, and stronger
   encryption than the one for RADIUS' User-Password is in use
   (typically TLS).

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   Still, the use of EAP does not encrypt all personally identifiable
   details of the user session.  In particular, the user's device can be
   identified by inspecting the Calling-Station-ID attribute; and the
   user's location may be derived from observing NAS-IP-Address, NAS-
   Identifier or Operator-Name attributes.  Since these attributes are
   not encrypted, even IP-layer third parties can harvest the
   corresponding data.  In a worst-case scenario, this enables the
   creation of mobility profiles.  Pervasive passive surveillance using
   this connection metadata such as the recently uncovered NSA/GCHQ
   incidents becomes possible by tapping RADIUS traffic from an IP hop
   near a RADIUS aggregation proxy.  While this is possible, the authors
   are not aware whether this has actually been done.

   These profiles are not necessarily linkable to an actual user because
   EAP allows for the use of anonymous outer identities and protected
   credential exchanges.  However, practical experience has shown that
   many users neglect to configure their supplicants in a privacy-
   preserving way or their supplicant doesn't support that.  In
   particular, for EAP-TLS users, the use of EAP-TLS identity protection
   is not usually implemented and cannot be used.  In eduroam, concerned
   individuals and IdPs which use EAP-TLS are using pseudonymous client
   certificates to provide for better privacy.

   One way out, at least for EAP types involving a username, is to
   pursue the creation and deployment of pre-configured supplicant
   configurations which makes all the required settings in user devices
   prior to their first connection attempt; this depends heavily on the
   remote configuration possibilities of the supplicants though.

   A further threat involves the verification of the EAP server's
   identity.  Even though the cryptographic foundation, TLS tunnels, is
   sound, there is a weakness in the supplicant configuration: many
   users do not understand or are willing to invest time into the
   inspection of server certificates or the installation of a trusted
   CA.  As a result, users may easily be tricked into connecting to an
   unauthorized EAP server, ultimately leading to a leak of their
   credentials to that unauthorized third party.

   Again, one way out of this particular threat is to pursue the
   creation and deployment of pre-configured supplicant configurations
   which makes all the required settings in user devices prior to their
   first connection attempt.

   Note: there are many different and vendor-proprietary ways to pre-
   configure a device with the necessary EAP parameters (examples
   include Apple, Inc's "mobileconfig" and Microsoft's "EAPHost" XML
   schema).  Some manufacturers even completely lack any means to
   distribute EAP configuration data.  We believe there is value in

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   defining a common EAP configuration metadata format which could be
   used across manufacturers, ideally leading to a situation where IEEE
   802.1X network end-users merely need to apply this configuration file
   to configure any of their devices securely with the required
   connection properties.

   Another possible privacy threat involves transport of user-specific
   attributes in a Reply-Message.  If, for example, a RADIUS server
   sends back a hypothetical RADIUS Vendor-Specific-Attribute "User-Role
   = Student of Computer Science" (e.g. for consumption of an SP RADIUS
   server and subsequent assignment into a "student" VLAN), this
   information would also be visible for third parties and could be
   added to the mobility profile.

   The only way out to mitigate all information leakage to third parties
   is by protecting the entire RADIUS packet payload so that IP-layer
   third parties cannot extract privacy-relevant information.  RFC2865
   RADIUS does not offer this possibility though.

4.  New Trust Fabric

   The operational difficulties with an ever increasing number of
   participants, as documented in the previous section, have led to a
   number of changes to the eduroam architecture that in turn have, as
   mentioned in the introduction, led to standardization effort.

   Note: The enhanced architecture components are fully backwards
   compatible with the existing installed base, and are in fact
   gradually replacing those parts of it where problems may arise.

   Whereas the user authentication using IEEE 802.1X and EAP has
   remained unchanged (i.e.  no need for end-users to change any
   configurations), the issues as reported above have resulted in a
   major overhaul of the way EAP messages are transported from the
   RADIUS server of the SP to that of the IdP and back.  The two
   fundamental changes are the use of TCP instead of UDP and reliance on
   TLS instead of shared secrets between RADIUS peers.

4.1.  RADIUS with TLS

   The deficiencies of RADIUS over UDP as described in Section 3.4
   warranted a search for a replacement of RFC2865 [RFC2865] for the
   transport of EAP.  By the time this need was understood, the
   designated successor protocol to RADIUS, Diameter [RFC3588], was
   already specified by the IETF.  However, within the operational
   constraints of eduroam:

   o  reasonably cheap to deploy on many administrative domains

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   o  supporting NASREQ Application

   o  supporting EAP Application

   o  supporting Diameter Redirect

   o  supporting validation of authentication requests of the most
      popular EAP types (EAP-TTLS, PEAP, and EAP-TLS)

   o  possibility to retrieve these credentials from popular backends
      such as Microsoft ActiveDirectory, MySQL

   no single implementation could be found.  In addition to that, no
   Wireless Access Points at the disposal of eduroam participants
   supported Diameter, nor did any of the manufacturers have a roadmap
   towards Diameter support.  This led to the open question of lossless
   translation from RADIUS to Diameter and vice versa; a question not
   satisfactorily answered by NASREQ.

   After monitoring the Diameter implementation landscape for a while,
   it became clear that a solution with better compatibility and a
   plausible upgrade path from the existing RADIUS hierarchy was needed.
   The eduroam community actively engaged in the IETF towards the
   specification of several enhancements to RADIUS to overcome the
   limitations mentioned in Section 3.  The outcome of this process was
   [RFC6614] and [I-D.ietf-radext-dynamic-discovery].

   With its use of TCP instead of UDP, and with its full packet
   encryption, while maintaining full packet format compatibility with
   RADIUS/UDP, RADIUS/TLS [RFC6614] allows to upgrade any given RADIUS
   link in eduroam without the need of a "flag day".

   In a first upgrade phase, the classic eduroam hierarchy (forwarding
   decision taken by inspecting the realm) remains intact.  That way,
   RADIUS/TLS merely enhances the underlying transport of the RADIUS
   datagrams.  But this already provides some key advantages:

   o  explicit peer reachability detection using long-lived TCP sessions

   o  protection of user credentials and all privacy-relevant RADIUS
      attributes

   RADIUS/TLS connections for the static hierarchy could be realised
   with the TLS-PSK operation mode (which effectively provides a 1:1
   replacement for RADIUS/UDP's "shared secrets"), but since this
   operation mode is not widely supported as of yet, all RADIUS/TLS
   links in eduroam are secured by TLS with X.509 certificates from a
   set of accredited CAs.

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   This first deployment phase does not yet solve the routing table
   complexity problem (see (Section 3.3); this aspect is covered by
   introducing dynamic discovery for RADIUS/TLS servers.

4.2.  Dynamic Discovery

   When introducing peer discovery, two separate issues had to be
   addressed:

   1.  How to find the network address of a responsible RADIUS server
       for a given realm?

   2.  How to verify that this realm is an authorized eduroam
       participant?

4.2.1.  Discovery of responsible server

   Issue 1 can relatively simply be addressed by putting eduroam-
   specific service discovery information into the global DNS tree.  In
   eduroam this is done by using Naming Authority Pointer (NAPTR)
   records as per the S-NAPTR specification [RFC3958] with a private-use
   NAPTR service tag ("x-eduroam:radius.tls").  The usage profile of
   that NAPTR resource record is that exclusively "S" type delegations
   are allowed, and that no regular expressions are allowed.

   A subsequent lookup of the resulting SRV records will eventually
   yield hostnames and IP addresses of the authoritative server(s) of a
   given realm.

   Example (wrapped for readability):

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   > dig -t naptr education.example.

   ;; ANSWER SECTION:
   education.example.            43200   IN      NAPTR   100 10 "s"
                                     "x-eduroam:radius.tls" ""
                                     _radsec._tcp.eduroam.example.

   > dig -t srv _radsec._tcp.eduroam.example.

   ;; ANSWER SECTION:
   _radsec._tcp.eduroam.example. 43200  IN      SRV     0 0 2083
                                                tld1.eduroam.example.

   > dig -t aaaa tld1.eduroam.example.

   ;; ANSWER SECTION:
   tld1.eduroam.example.         21751  IN      AAAA    2001:db8:1::2

                        Figure 3: SRV record lookup

   From the operational experience with this mode of operation, eduroam
   is pursuing standardisation of this approach for generic AAA use
   cases.  The current radext working group document for this is
   [I-D.ietf-radext-dynamic-discovery].

4.2.2.  Verifying server authorisation

   Any organisation can put "x-eduroam" NAPTR entries into their Domain
   Name Server, pretending to be eduroam Identity Provider for the
   corresponding realm.  Since eduroam is a service for a heterogeneous,
   but closed, user group, additional sources of information need to be
   consulted to verify that a realm with its discovered server is
   actually an eduroam participant.

   The eduroam consortium has chosen to deploy a separate PKI
   infrastructure which issues certificates only to authorised eduroam
   Identity Providers and eduroam Service Providers.  Since certificates
   are needed for RADIUS/TLS anyway, this was a straightforward
   solution.  The PKI fabric allows multiple CAs as trust roots
   (overseen by a Policy Management Authority), and requires that
   certificates which were issued to verified eduroam participants are
   marked with corresponding "X509v3 Policy OID" fields; eduroam RADIUS
   servers and clients need to verify the existence of these OIDs in the
   incoming certificates.

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   The policies and OIDs can be retrieved from the "eduPKI Trust Profile
   for eduroam Certificates" ([edupki]).

4.2.3.  Operational Experience

   The discovery model as described above is currently deployed in
   approximately 10 countries that participate in eduroam, making more
   than 100 realms discoverable via their NAPTR records.  Experience has
   shown that the model works and scales as expected; the only drawback
   being that the additional burden of operating a PKI which is not
   local to the national eduroam administrators creates significant
   administrative complexities.  Also, the presence of multiple CAs and
   regular updates of Certificate Revocation Lists makes the operation
   of RADIUS servers more complex.

4.2.4.  Possible Alternatives

   There are two alternatives to the above approach which are monitored
   by the eduroam community:

   1.  DNSSEC + DANE TLSA records

   2.  ABFAB Trust Router

   For DNSSEC+DANE TLSA, its biggest advantage is that the certificate
   data itself can be stored in the DNS - possibly obsoleting the PKI
   infrastructure *if* a new place for the server authorization checks
   can be found.  Its most significant downside is that the DANE
   specifications only include client-to-server certificate checks,
   while RADIUS/TLS requires also server-to-client verification.

   For the ABFAB Trust Router, the biggest advantage is that it would
   work without certificates altogether (by negotiating TLS-PSK keys ad-
   hoc).  The downside is that it is currently not formally specified
   and not as thoroughly understood as any of the other solutions.

5.  Abuse prevention and incident handling

   Since the eduroam service is a confederation of autonomous networks,
   there is little justification for transferring accounting information
   from the Service Provider to any other in general, or in particular
   to the Identity Provider of the user.  Accounting in eduroam is
   therefore considered to be a local matter of the Service Provider.
   The eduroam compliance statement ([eduroam-compliance]) in fact
   specifies that accounting traffic SHOULD NOT be forwarded.

   The static routing infrastructure of eduroam acts as a filtering
   system blocking accounting traffic from misconfigured local RADIUS

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   servers.  Proxy servers are configured to terminate accounting
   request traffic by answering to Accounting-Requests with an
   Accounting-Response in order to prevent the retransmission of
   orphaned Accounting-Request messages.

   Roaming creates accountability problems, as identified by [RFC4372]
   (Chargeable User Identity).  Since the NAS can only see the (likely
   anonymous) outer identity of the user, it is impossible to correlate
   usage with a specific user (who may use multiple devices).  A NAS
   that supports this can request the Chargeable-User-Identity and, if
   supplied by the authenticating RADIUS server in the Access-Accept
   message, add this value to corresponding Access-Request packets.
   While eduroam does not have any charging mechanisms, it may still be
   desirable to identify traffic originating from one particular user.
   One of the reasons is to prevent abuse of guest access by users
   living nearby university campuses.  Chargeable User Identity (see
   below) supplies the perfect answer to this problem, however at the
   moment of writing, to our knowledge only one hardware vendor (Meru
   Networks) implements RFC4372 on their Access Points.  For all other
   vendors, requesting the Chargeable-User-Identity attribute needs to
   happen on the RADIUS server to which the Access Point is connected
   to.  FreeRADIUS supports this ability in the latest distribution, and
   Radiator can be retrofitted to do the same.

5.1.  Incident Handling

   10 years of experience with eduroam have not exposed any serious
   incident.  This may be taken as evidence for proper security design
   as well as suggest that awareness of users that they are
   identifiable, acts as an effective deterrent.  It could of course
   also mean that eduroam operations lack the proper tools or insight
   into the actual use and potential abuse of the service.  In any case,
   many of the attack vectors that exist in open networks or networks
   where access control is based on shared secrets are not present,
   arguably leading to a much more secure system.

   The European eduroam policy Service Definition
   [eduroam-service-definition], as an example, describes incident
   scenarios and actions to be taken, in this document we present the
   relevant technical issues.

   The first action in the case of an incident is to block the user's
   access to eduroam at the Service Provider.  Since the roaming user's
   true identity is likely hidden behind an anonymous/fake outer
   identity, the Service Provider can only rely on the realm of the
   user.  Without cooperation from the user's Identity Provider, the
   SP's options are limited to blocking authentications from the entire
   realm, which may be considered as too harsh.  On the other hand, the

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   IdP has only the possibility of blocking the user's authentication
   entirely, thus blocking this user from accessing eduroam in all
   sites.  With eduroam becoming more and more global it can be expected
   that differences of opinions in interpreting user's actions may arise
   between SPs and IdPs.  It is obviously the right of an SP to provide
   guest access only under certain conditions.  When these conditions
   are violated by the user, the network access may be blocked at the
   current site.  However there may be situations where such a
   restriction should only apply at a given SP and not eduroam as a
   whole.  The initial implementation has been lacking a tool for an SP
   to make it's own decision or for an IdP to introduce a conditional
   rule applying only to a given SP.  The introduction of support for
   Operator-Name and Chargeable-User-Identity (see below) to eduroam
   makes both of these scenarios possible.

5.2.  Operator Name

   The Operator-Name attribute is defined in [RFC5580] as a means of
   unique identification of the access site.

   The Proxy infrastructure of eduroam makes it impossible for home
   sites to tell where their users roam to.  While this may be seen as a
   positive aspect enhancing user's privacy, it also makes user support,
   roaming statistics and blocking offending user's access to eduroam
   significantly harder.

   Sites participating in eduroam are encouraged to add the Operator-
   Name attribute using the REALM namespace, i.e. sending a realm name
   under control of the given site.

   The introduction of Operator-Name in eduroam has identified one
   operational problem - the identifier 126 assigned to this attribute
   has been previously used by some vendors for their specific purposes
   and has been included in attribute dictionaries of several RADIUS
   server distributions.  Since the syntax of this hijacked attribute
   had been set to Integer, this introduces a syntax clash with the the
   RFC definition (OctetString).  Operational tests in eduroam have
   shown that servers using the Integer syntax for attribute 126 may
   either truncate the value to 4 octets or even drop the entire RADIUS
   packet (thus making authentication impossible).  The eduroam
   monitoring and eduroam test tools try to locate problematic sites.

   When a Service Provider sends its Operator-Name value, it creates a
   possibility for the home sites to set up conditional blocking rules,
   depriving certain users of access to selected sites.  Such action
   will cause much less concern than blocking users from all of eduroam.

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   In eduroam the Operator Name is also used for the generation of
   Chargeable User Identity values.

   The addition of Operator-Name is a straightforward configuration of
   the RADIUS server and may be easily introduced on a large scale.

5.3.  Chargeable User Identity

   The Chargeable-User-Identity (CUI) attribute is defined by RFC4372
   [RFC4372] as an answer to accounting problems caused by the use of
   anonymous identity in some EAP methods.  In eduroam the primary use
   of CUI is in incident handling, but it can also enhance local
   accounting.

   The eduroam policy requires that a given user's CUI generated for
   requests originating from different sites should be different (to
   prevent collusion attacks).  The eduroam policy thus mandates that a
   CUI request be accompanied by the Operator-Name attribute, which is
   used as one of the inputs for the CUI generation algorithm.  The
   Operator-Name requirement is considered to be the "business
   requirement" described in Section 2.1 of RFC4372 [RFC4372] and hence
   conforms to the RFC.

   When eduroam started considering using CUI, there were no NAS
   implementations, therefore the only solution was moving all CUI
   support to the RADIUS server.

   CUI request generation requires only the addition of NUL CUI
   attributes to outgoing Access-Requests, however the real strength of
   CUI comes with accounting.  Implementation of CUI based accounting in
   the server requires that the authentication and accounting RADIUS
   servers used directly by the NAS are actually the same or at least
   have access to a common source of information.  Upon processing of an
   Access-Accept the authenticating RADIUS server must store the
   received CUI value together with the device's Calling-Station-Id in a
   temporary database.  Upon receipt of an Accounting-Request, the
   server needs to update the packet with the CUI value read from the
   database.

   A wide introduction of CUI support in eduroam will significantly
   simplify incident handling at Service Providers.  Introducing local,
   per-user access restriction will be possible.  Visited sites will
   also be able to notify the home site about the introduction of such a
   restriction, pointing to the CUI value an thus making it possible for
   the home site to identify the user.  When the user reports the
   problem at his home support, the reason will be already known.

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6.  Privacy Considerations

   The eduroam architecture has been designed with protection of user
   credentials in mind as may be clear from the discussion above.
   However, operational experience has revealed some more subtle points
   with regards to privacy.

6.1.  Collusion of Service Providers

   If users use anonymous outer identities, SPs cannot easily collude by
   linking outer identities to users that are visiting their campus.
   This poses however problems with remediation of abuse or
   misconfiguration.  It is impossible to find the user that exhibits
   unwanted behaviour or whose system has been compromised.

   For that reason the Chargeable-User-Identity has been introduced in
   eduroam, constructed so that only the IdP of the user can uniquely
   identify the user.  In order to prevent collusion attacks that CUI is
   required to be unique per user per Service Provider.

6.2.  Exposing user credentials

   Through the use of EAP, user credentials are not visible to anyone
   but the IdP of the user.  That is, if a sufficiently secure EAP-
   method is chosen.

   There is one privacy sensitive user attribute that is necessarily
   exposed to third parties and that is the realm the user belongs to.
   Routing in eduroam is based on the realm part of the user identifier,
   so even though the outer identity in a tunneled EAP-method may be set
   to an anonymous identifier it MUST contain the realm of the user, and
   may thus lead to identifying the user if the realm in question
   contains few users.  This is considered a reasonable trade-of between
   user privacy and usability.

6.3.  Track location of users

   Due to the fact that access requests (potentially) travel through a
   number of proxy RADIUS servers, the home IdP of the user typically
   cannot tell where a user roams to.

   The introduction of Operator-Name and dynamic lookups (i.e. direct
   connections between IdP and SP) however, give the home IdP insight
   into the location of the user.

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7.  Security Considerations

   This section addresses only security considerations associated with
   the use of eduroam.  For considerations relating to IEEE 802.1X,
   RADIUS and EAP in general, the reader is referred to the respective
   specification and to other literature.

7.1.  Man in the middle and Tunneling Attacks

   The security of user credentials in eduroam ultimately lies within
   the EAP server verification during the EAP conversation.  Therefore,
   the eduroam policy mandates that only EAP types capable of mutual
   authentication are allowed in the infrastructure, and requires that
   IdPs publish all information that is required to uniquely identify
   the server (i.e. usually the EAP server's CA certificate and its
   Common Name or subjectAltName:dNSName).

   While this in principle makes Man-in-the-middle attacks impossible,
   practice has shown that several attack vectors exist nonetheless.
   Most of these deficiencies are due to implementation shortcomings in
   EAP supplicants.  Examples:

7.1.1.  Verification of Server Name not supported

   Some supplicants only allow to specify which CA issues the EAP server
   certificate; it's name is not checked.  As a result, any entity that
   is able to get a server certificate from the same CA can create its
   own EAP server and trick the end user to submit his credentials to
   that fake server.

   As a mitigation to that problem, eduroam Operations suggests the use
   of a private CA which exclusively issues certificates to the
   organisation's EAP servers.  In that case, no other entity will get a
   certificate from the CA and the above supplicant shortcoming does not
   present a security threat any more.

7.1.2.  Neither Specification of CA nor Server Name checks during
        bootstrap

   Some supplicants allow for insecure bootstrapping in that they allow
   to simply select a network and accept the incoming server
   certificate, identified by its fingerprint.  The certificate is then
   saved as trusted for later re-connection attempts.  If users are near
   a fake hotspot during initial provisioning, they may be tricked to
   submit their credentials to a fake server; and furthermore will be
   branded to trust only that fake server in the future.

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   eduroam Identity Providers are advised to provide their users with
   complete documentation for setup of their supplicants without the
   shortcut of insecure bootstrapping.  In addition, eduroam Operations
   has created a tool which makes correct, complete and secure settings
   on many supplicants: eduroam CAT ([eduroam-cat] ).

7.1.3.  User does not configure CA or Server Name checks

   Unless automatic provisioning tools such as eduroam CAT are used, it
   is cumbersome for users to initially configure an EAP supplicant
   securely.  User Inferfaces of supplicants often invite the users to
   take shortcuts ("Don't check server certificate") which are easier to
   setup or hide important security settings in badly accessible sub-
   menus.  Such shortcuts or security parameter ommissions make the user
   subject to man-in-the-middle attacks.

   eduroam IdPs are advised to educate their users regarding the
   necessary steps towards a secure setup. eduroam Research and
   Development is in touch with supplicant developers to improve their
   User Interfaces.

7.1.4.  Tunneling authentication traffic to obfuscate user origin

   There is no link between the EAP outer ("anonymous") identity and the
   EAP inner ("real") identity.  In particular, they can both contain a
   realm name, and the realms need not be identical.  It is possible to
   craft packets with an outer identity of user@RealmB, and an inner
   identity of user@realmA.  With the eduroam request routing, a Service
   Provider would assume that the user is from realmB and send the
   request there.  The server at realm B inspects the inner user name,
   and if proxying is not explicitly disabled for tunneled request
   content, may decide to send the tunneled EAP payload to realmA, where
   the user authenticates.  A CUI value would likely be generated by the
   server at realmB, even though this is not its user.

   Users can craft such packets to make their identification harder;
   usually, the eduroam SP would assume the troublesome user to
   originate from realmB and demand there that the user be blocked.  The
   operator of realmB however has no control over the user, and can only
   trace back the user to his real origin if logging of proxied requests
   is also enabled for EAP tunnel data.

   eduroam Identity Providers are advised to explicitly disable proxying
   on the parts of their RADIUS server configuration which processes EAP
   tunnel data.

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7.2.  Denial of Service Attacks

   Since eduroam's roaming infrastructure is based on IP and RADIUS, it
   suffers from the usual DoS attack vectors that apply to these
   protocols.

   The eduroam hotspots are susceptible to typical attacks on consumer
   edge networks, such as rogue RA, rogue DHCP servers, and others.
   Notably, eduroam hotspots are more robust against malign users' DHCP
   pool exhaustion than typical open or "captive portal" hotspots,
   because a DHCP address is only leased after a successful
   authentication, which reduces the pool of possible attackers to
   eduroam account holders (as opposed to the general public).
   Furthermore, attacks involving ARP spoofing or ARP flooding are also
   reduced to authenticated users, because an attacker needs to be in
   possession of a valid WPA2 session key to be able to send traffic on
   the network.

   This section does not discuss standard threats to consumer edge
   networks and IP networks in general.  The following sections describe
   attack vectors specific to eduroam.

7.2.1.  Intentional DoS by malign individuals

   The eduroam infrastructure is more robust against Distributed DoS
   attacks than typical services which are reachable on the internet
   because triggering authentication traffic can only be done when
   physically being in proximity of an eduroam hotspot (be it a wired
   IEEE 802.1X enabled socket or a Wi-Fi Access Point).

   However, when being in the vicinity, it is easy to craft
   authentication attempts that traverse the entire international
   eduroam infrastructure; an attacker merely needs to choose a realm
   from another world region than his physical location to trigger
   Access-Requests which need to be processed by the SP, then SP-side
   national, then world region, then target world region, then target
   national, then target IdP server.  So long as the realm actually
   exists, this will be followed by an entire EAP conversation on that
   path.  Not having actual credentials, the request will ultimately be
   rejected; but it consumed processing power and bandwidth across the
   entire infrastructure, possibly affecting all international
   authentication traffic.

   EAP is a lock-step protocol.  A single attacker at an eduroam hotspot
   can only execute one EAP conversation after another, and is thus
   rate-limited by round-trip times of the RADIUS chain.

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   Currently eduroam processes several hundred thousands of successful
   international roaming authentications per day (and, incidentally,
   approximately 1.5 times as many Access-Rejects).  With the
   requirement of physical proximity, and the rate-limiting induced by
   EAP's lock-step nature, it requires a significant amount of attackers
   and a time-coordinated attack to produce significant load.  So far
   eduroam Operations has not yet observed critical load conditions
   which could reasonably be attributed to such an attack.

   The introduction of dynamic discovery further eases this problem, as
   authentications will then not traverse all infrastructure servers,
   removing the world-region aggregation servers as obvious bottlenecks.
   Any attack would then be limited between an SP and IdP directly.

7.2.2.  DoS as a side-effect of expired credentials

   In eduroam Operations it is observed that a significant portion of
   (failed) eduroam authentications is due to user accounts which were
   once valid, but have in the meantime been de-provisioned (e.g. if a
   student has left the university after graduation).  Configured
   eduroam accounts are often retained on the user devices, and when in
   the vicinity of an eduroam hotspot, the user device's operating
   system will attempt to connect to this network.

   As operation of eduroam continues, the amount of devices with left-
   over configurations is growing, effectively creating a pool of
   devices which produce unwanted network traffic whenever they can.

   Up until recently, this problem did not emerge with much prominence,
   because there is also a natural shrinking of that pool of devices due
   to users finally de-commissioning their old computing hardware.

   As of recent, particularly smartphones are programmed to make use of
   cloud storage and online backup mechanisms which save most, or all,
   configuration details of the device with a third-party.  When
   renewing their personal computing hardware, users can restore the old
   settings onto the new device.  It has been observed that expired
   eduroam accounts can survive perpetually on user devices that way.
   If this trend continues, it can be pictured that an always-growing
   pool of devices will clog up eduroam infrastructure with doomed-to-
   fail authentication requests.

   There is not currently a useful remedy to this problem, other than
   instructing users to manually delete their configuration in due time.
   Possible approaches to this problem are:

   o  Creating a culture of device provisioning where the provisioning
      profile contains a "ValidUntil" property, after which the

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      configuration needs to be re-validated or disabled.  This requires
      a data format for provisioning as well as implementation support.

   o  Improvements to supplicant software so that it maintains state
      over failed authentications.  E.g. if a previously known-working
      configuration failed to authenticate consistently for 30 calendar
      days, it should be considered stale and be disabled.

8.  IANA Considerations

   There are no IANA Considerations

9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC2865]  Rigney, C., Willens, S., Rubens, A., and W. Simpson,
              "Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)", RFC
              2865, June 2000.

   [RFC2866]  Rigney, C., "RADIUS Accounting", RFC 2866, June 2000.

   [RFC3748]  Aboba, B., Blunk, L., Vollbrecht, J., Carlson, J., and H.
              Levkowetz, "Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)", RFC
              3748, June 2004.

   [RFC4279]  Eronen, P. and H. Tschofenig, "Pre-Shared Key Ciphersuites
              for Transport Layer Security (TLS)", RFC 4279, December
              2005.

   [RFC4372]  Adrangi, F., Lior, A., Korhonen, J., and J. Loughney,
              "Chargeable User Identity", RFC 4372, January 2006.

   [RFC5176]  Chiba, M., Dommety, G., Eklund, M., Mitton, D., and B.
              Aboba, "Dynamic Authorization Extensions to Remote
              Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)", RFC 5176,
              January 2008.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.

   [RFC5247]  Aboba, B., Simon, D., and P. Eronen, "Extensible
              Authentication Protocol (EAP) Key Management Framework",
              RFC 5247, August 2008.

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   [RFC5280]  Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S.,
              Housley, R., and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List
              (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, May 2008.

   [RFC5580]  Tschofenig, H., Adrangi, F., Jones, M., Lior, A., and B.
              Aboba, "Carrying Location Objects in RADIUS and Diameter",
              RFC 5580, August 2009.

   [RFC5997]  DeKok, A., "Use of Status-Server Packets in the Remote
              Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) Protocol",
              RFC 5997, August 2010.

   [RFC6066]  Eastlake, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions:
              Extension Definitions", RFC 6066, January 2011.

   [RFC6613]  DeKok, A., "RADIUS over TCP", RFC 6613, May 2012.

   [RFC6614]  Winter, S., McCauley, M., Venaas, S., and K. Wierenga,
              "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Encryption for RADIUS",
              RFC 6614, May 2012.

   [RFC6973]  Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J.,
              Morris, J., Hansen, M., and R. Smith, "Privacy
              Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973, July
              2013.

9.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-abfab-arch]
              Howlett, J., Hartman, S., Tschofenig, H., Lear, E., and J.
              Schaad, "Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond
              Web (ABFAB) Architecture", draft-ietf-abfab-arch-10 (work
              in progress), December 2013.

   [I-D.ietf-radext-dtls]
              DeKok, A., "DTLS as a Transport Layer for RADIUS", draft-
              ietf-radext-dtls-09 (work in progress), February 2014.

   [I-D.ietf-radext-dynamic-discovery]
              Winter, S. and M. McCauley, "NAI-based Dynamic Peer
              Discovery for RADIUS/TLS and RADIUS/DTLS", draft-ietf-
              radext-dynamic-discovery-10 (work in progress), February
              2014.

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   [MD5-attacks]
              Black, J., Cochran, M., and T. Highland, "A Study of the
              MD5 Attacks: Insights and Improvements", October 2006,
              <http://www.springerlink.com/content/40867l85727r7084/>.

   [RFC3539]  Aboba, B. and J. Wood, "Authentication, Authorization and
              Accounting (AAA) Transport Profile", RFC 3539, June 2003.

   [RFC3588]  Calhoun, P., Loughney, J., Guttman, E., Zorn, G., and J.
              Arkko, "Diameter Base Protocol", RFC 3588, September 2003.

   [RFC3958]  Daigle, L. and A. Newton, "Domain-Based Application
              Service Location Using SRV RRs and the Dynamic Delegation
              Discovery Service (DDDS)", RFC 3958, January 2005.

   [RFC4017]  Stanley, D., Walker, J., and B. Aboba, "Extensible
              Authentication Protocol (EAP) Method Requirements for
              Wireless LANs", RFC 4017, March 2005.

   [RFC4107]  Bellovin, S. and R. Housley, "Guidelines for Cryptographic
              Key Management", BCP 107, RFC 4107, June 2005.

   [RFC4346]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.1", RFC 4346, April 2006.

   [RFC4953]  Touch, J., "Defending TCP Against Spoofing Attacks", RFC
              4953, July 2007.

   [RFC6125]  Saint-Andre, P. and J. Hodges, "Representation and
              Verification of Domain-Based Application Service Identity
              within Internet Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509
              (PKIX) Certificates in the Context of Transport Layer
              Security (TLS)", RFC 6125, March 2011.

   [RFC6421]  Nelson, D., "Crypto-Agility Requirements for Remote
              Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS)", RFC 6421,
              November 2011.

   [dead-realm]
              Tomasek, J., "Dead-realm marking feature for Radiator
              RADIUS servers", 2006,
              <http://wiki.eduroam.cz/dead-realm/docs/dead-realm.html>.

   [dot1X-standard]
              IEEE, "IEEE std 802.1X-2010", February 2010,
              <http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/
              802.1X-2010.pdf>.

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   [edupki]   Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe,
              "eduPKI", 2012, <https://www.edupki.org/edupki-pma/edupki-
              trust-profiles/>.

   [eduroam-cat]
              Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe,
              "eduroam CAT", 2012, <https://cat.eduroam.org>.

   [eduroam-compliance]
              Trans-European Research and Education Networking
              Association, "eduroam compliance statement", 2011,
              <http://www.eduroam.org/downloads/docs/
              eduroam_Compliance_Statement_v1_0.pdf>.

   [eduroam-homepage]
              Trans-European Research and Education Networking
              Association, "eduroam Homepage", 2007,
              <http://www.eduroam.org/>.

   [eduroam-policy]
              Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe,
              "European Confederation eduroam policy", 2011,
              <http://www.eduroam.org/downloads/docs/GN3-12-194_eduroam-
              policy-%20for-signing_ver2%204_18052012.pdf>.

   [eduroam-service-definition]
              Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe,
              "European eduroam policy Service Definition", 2011,
              <https://www.eduroam.org/downloads/docs/GN3-12
              -192_eduroam-policy-service-
              definition_ver28_26072012.pdf>.

   [eduroam-start]
              Wierenga, K., "Initial proposal for what is now called
              eduroam", 2002, <http://www.terena.org/activities/
              tf-mobility/start-of-eduroam.pdf>.

   [geant2]   Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe,
              "European Commission Information Society and Media:
              GEANT2", 2008, <http://www.geant2.net/>.

   [nrenroaming-select]
              Trans-European Research and Education Networking
              Association, "Preliminary selection for inter-NREN
              roaming", 2003, <http://www.terena.org/activities/
              tf-mobility/deliverables/delG/DelG-final.pdf/>.

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   [radsec-whitepaper]
              Open System Consultants, "RadSec - a secure, reliable
              RADIUS Protocol", May 2005,
              <http://www.open.com.au/radiator/radsec-whitepaper.pdf>.

   [radsecproxy-impl]
              Venaas, S., "radsecproxy Project Homepage", 2007,
              <http://software.uninett.no/radsecproxy/>.

   [terena]   TERENA, "Trans-European Research and Education Networking
              Association", 2008, <http://www.terena.org/>.

Appendix A.  Acknowledgments

   The authors would like to thank the participants in the TERENA Task
   Force on Mobility and Network Middleware as well as the Geant project
   for their reviews and contributions.  Special thanks go to Jim Schaad
   for doing an excellent review of the first version.

   The eduroam trademark is registered by TERENA.

Appendix B.  Changes

   This section to be removed prior to publication.

   o  00 Initial Revision

   o  01 Added Dynamic Discovery, addressed review comments

   o  02 Cosmetic changes

   o  03 Even More Cosmetic Changes

Authors' Addresses

   Klaas Wierenga
   Cisco Systems
   Haarlerbergweg 13-19
   Amsterdam  1101 CH
   The Netherlands

   Phone: +31 20 357 1752
   Email: klaas@cisco.com

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   Stefan Winter
   Fondation RESTENA
   6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
   Luxembourg  1359
   Luxembourg

   Phone: +352 424409 1
   Fax:   +352 422473
   Email: stefan.winter@restena.lu
   URI:   http://www.restena.lu.

   Tomasz Wolniewicz
   Nicolaus Copernicus University
   pl. Rapackiego 1
   Torun
   Poland

   Phone: +48-56-611-2750
   Fax:   +48-56-622-1850
   Email: twoln@umk.pl
   URI:   http://www.home.umk.pl/~twoln/

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