mmalone
Joined 19 years ago
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Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
You can roll your own with https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. We maintain major open source projects and contribute a lot to other projects. I don’t think that means everything we do has to be open source. Sorry this one wasn’t. Doing this in pure open source would be a book, not a blog post.
Love Let’s Encrypt — we’re sponsors — but using them for WiFi is a terrible idea. You need internal PKI for WiFi.
Comment · 2 years ago
Correct.
Comment · 2 years ago
Well... the title is hyperbolic (as titles are wont to be), but the goal was to configure Wifi that aligns with the CNSA Suite[1] / CNSSP 15[2], which I think is fair to call "NSA-grade" since they wrote the standard.
If the NSA wants to get a certificate that your system trusts there are already dozens of organizations with root certs in your system trust store that they can strongarm. Most organizations can't afford to have the NSA in their threat model. You better not be using public clouds, GSuite, Okta, Azure AD/Entra, etc. This is a difficult security posture to maintain, especially at scale.
For most organizations, delegating the operation of sensitive security infrastructure to a third party results in better security, not worse. Yes, you're trusting a third party. But you're also outsourcing sensitive security operations to experts.
And, we also have on-prem and open source if you really need something air-gapped ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_National_Security_A... [2] https://www.cnss.gov/CNSS/issuances/Policies.cfm
Comment · 2 years ago
I work at smallstep.
For home wifi this is totally overkill. Better security is always nice but, in this case, there's a significant usability & interop tradeoff for home use (though that may change over time... we'll see).
For business / enterprise settings, this has real value. Distributing a password to everyone doesn't scale and alternative EAP methods have huge security problems. For managed devices, certs can be pushed and EAP-TLS can be configured easily. And it's all seamless for end users[1].
For example, EAP-TLS mitigates "evil twin" attacks, where a rogue access point broadcasts your SSID. If you're using something like EAP-PEAP, which is password based, the user is sending a password to the RADIUS server. If they connect to a rogue AP, they just sent their password to the bad guy. If the password is their LDAP/AD/Okta password, that could be very bad.
There are a variety of mitigations for this sort of attack but, without getting into details, EAP-TLS is widely considered the most secure option. So, yea, if you're relying exclusively on wifi for security you're doing it wrong. But that doesn't mean you don't need to secure your wifi.
Comment · 2 years ago
I work at smallstep. Yes. This also works with FreeRadius! We decided to integrate RADIUS into our product since setting up FreeRadius is complicated and, if you're just doing EAP-TLS for Wifi, you don't need all of the features. You don't need to use our hosted RADIUS though.
Comment · 2 years ago
I work at Smallstep.
In this case you're getting an industrial-grade CA with a properly managed private key, etc. Still, fair. We usually include warnings about this, but looks like we forgot this time. Curse of knowledge. I'll see about getting a warning on there asap.
Comment · 2 years ago
I work at smallstep.
Not sure about the RADIUS server, but connections to the CA use TLS for SCEP and/or ACME DA so the CA root cert needs to be trusted for TLS. There may be some way to configure more narrow trust for just this one interaction, but I'm not aware of any such mechanism in the current releases of macOS/iOS/iPadOS/tvOS.
Comment · 2 years ago
> For the use case cited -- blocking MAC spoofing, EAP-TLS doesn't quite solve it
The idea would be to rely on the client certificate authentication and not use MAC filtering at all. For example, you could have an EAP-TLS network that's unrestricted and not let Mallory on it. Or you could use RADIUS reply attributes to put Mallory on a restricted vlan.
Comment · 2 years ago
If you're doing EAP-TLS wouldn't the ARP attack you're describing fail at the client when it's unable to verify the RADIUS server's certificate?
Comment · 2 years ago
What would happen if you tried to reconnect to the network and the AP didn't have the pre-shared key? Presumably, you'd prompt the user and ask them if they want to connect. This is the same pattern as trust-on-first-use (TOFU) for SSH, except for non-expert users. It's a good thought but I think it'd fall apart in practice. You'd still be vulnerable to phishing / evil twin APs.
Comment · 4 years ago
It's a critique of OpenSSL, which also makes no attempt to think of user experience.
Comment · 4 years ago
This is not a technical limitation though. It's a policy limitation.
In theory, a name-constrained intermediate for `.example.com` has no more authority and poses no greater risk than a wildcard leaf certificate for `.example.com`. In both cases the private key can be used to authenticate as any subdomain of `example.com`.
But, name constraints are verified by relying parties (the clients and servers that are actually authenticating remote peers using certificates). It's hard to be certain that everything has implemented name constraints properly. This is, ostensibly and as far as I know, the reason CA/Browser forum hasn't allowed name constrained intermediates.
At some point it probably makes sense to just pull the bandaid off.
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm biased because I'm the founder of the company, but you should check out the certificate management toolchain (CA[1] and CLI[2]) we've built at smallstep. A big focus of the project is human-friendliness. It's not perfect (yet) but I think we've made some good progress.
We also have a hosted option[3] with a free tier that should work for individuals, homelabs, pre-production, and even small production environments. We've started building out a management UI there, and it does map to the CLI as you've described :).
[1] https://github.com/smallstep/certificates
Comment · 4 years ago
You can put "name constraints" on an intermediate that, in theory, can restrict the intermediate to only signing certs for a particular subdomain. In theory, name-constrained intermediate certificate for `.example.com` would have no more authority than a wildcard certificate for `.example.com`.
But, name constraints are enforced by "relying parties" -- HTTPS/TLS clients & servers that are validating certificates and authenticating remote peers. In practice, there's a risk that a broken/misconfigured relying party would trust a cert for google.com signed by an intermediate that's name constrained / only trusted to issue for `*.example.com`.
Fact remains, though, that users will probably bypass any certificate warnings (if allowed) and send their passwords to rogue APs. EAP-TLS mitigates this. Definitely pros & cons, but that's a clear win for EAP-TLS.
There are a lot of things that'd be nice to see in Wifi. Binding the SSID is an interesting one, though I suspect the folks working on this stuff were reluctant to rely on (and trust) the Web PKI CAs. If you're gonna push your own root cert, you might as well push a RADIUS SAN along with it, I guess.