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Paranoid Penguin - Securing WLANs with WPA and FreeRADIUS, Part I

Issue 132

From Issue #132
April 2005

Mar 01, 2005  By Mick Bauer
 in
Upgrade your wireless network from the old, insecure WEP to the new standard—and integrate the authentication with your Linux network.
TKIP and WEP Keying

If a supplicant is authenticated by way of EAP-TLS or some other encrypted version of EAP, that authentication traffic also is encrypted. But the wireless LAN frames themselves are not; that can't happen until WEP is enabled on the connection between the supplicant system and the access point. As it happens, from the implementor's standpoint, this is the simplest part of WPA. Upon successful authentication, the server, authenticator and supplicant use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to negotiate and transmit WEP keys securely for use between the authenticator and the supplicant system. This process largely is transparent: you do not need to configure anything on the server or supplicant for this to work. However, most access points, including hostapd on Linux, can be configured with custom settings for things such as WEP-re-keying interval.

The other thing to remember about TKIP is, as I mentioned earlier, the server is optional. If you've configured your supplicants and authenticator to use pre-shared key (PSK) mode, TKIP still is used to key and re-key WEP encryption dynamically between your supplicant and access point.

Conclusion (for Now)

That's WPA in a nutshell. Next time, we'll apply these concepts of using FreeRADIUS to create a Linux-based authentication server for WPA. If you can't wait until then to get started, check out the on-line Resources for more information. Be safe!

Resources for this article: /article/8070.

Mick Bauer, CISSP, is Linux Journal's security editor and an IS security consultant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. O'Reilly & Associates recently released the second edition of his book Linux Server Security (January 2005). Mick also composes industrial polka music, but has the good taste seldom to perform it.

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"Securing WLANs ..." Online Resources

bbatten's picture
Submitted by bbatten on Tue, 04/05/2005 - 15:23.

The resources link just keeps looping me back to the article itself.

dificulties

marilene's picture
Submitted by marilene (not verified) on Tue, 07/25/2006 - 17:59.

Hi, I'm Marilene. I'm from Brazil and I was doing the steps of this tutorial, but the tutorial doesn't say how I can configure the linux clients.
And I am with dificulties to configure the windows xp clients. I configured the mmc, but the cliente can't autenticate in the radius server. I did an update in the windows, tryed with two differents wireless LANs, but don't works.

Someone could help me????

Thanks a lot,
Marilene

Part 2 of this guide can be

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 08/31/2006 - 05:28.

Part 2 of this guide can be found here:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8095

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