Live data from Hacker News

WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

smallstep.com

81–90 of 201 posts

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#81
> Because you need certificates, your Smart Home devices won’t support WPA3 Enterprise. Home printers won’t support it. A lot of things won't support it. In fact, it’s a miracle that some consumer-grade routers and access points support it at all.

It's not really a miracle. It's just much easier to do from the access point side because the whole authentication process is basically offloaded to the radius server. It doesn't add a lot of complexity to the actual access point or router. The radius server itself is usually not included with these solutions, they're just capable of talking to one. It's just an easy to achieve bullet point for a feature list.

On client devices however it's a huge pita building a mechanism to manage client certificates, the verification chain and related requirements. It also has to be able to verify the radius server's identity so it needs a full list of fully up to date root CAs (including private PKIs and a way to add them too) and be able to check their revocation. And you need accurate time while not actually having internet access yet. And then there's automatic issuing. Most businesses don't just hand you a certificate, it's issued on the fly by a company HSM after the client device first generates its private key and then installed automatically by MDM after it determines your device is trusted enough. Like obeying security settings like encryption, having the required Antimalware installed and updated etc. It's also automatically revoked if that is no longer the case.

If you just hand it to a user and let them use it wherever they want it's not a lot better than a password really. So nobody actually does this in the real world. So the endpoint needs to be able to talk to various MDMs which is certainly feasible on a phone or computer but not on a simple printer, IP cam or smart device.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#82
It makes me sad that even WPA3 doesn’t have a native provisioning mechanism. In a better world, a device would present its MAC address, some description of itself, a public key, and optional extra data (e.g. an attestation of the hardware security backing its keypair, and the network operator could, at its leisure, accept this device. Then printers, smart devices, etc could join without needing to each support an MDM or other proprietary provisioning system.

Also, if you care about availability, don’t use a cloud RADIUS server — if the server or your ISP or your route or the relevant part of your network goes down, there goes your WiFi. If you’re using 802.1x, your wired network is toast, too.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#83
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why WPA3 doesn't have a mode where a password is used for the initial connection, but then the client and AP generate a keypair and each store their half and use that for all future connections. Because it would regress security back to inferior bearer authentication.

It's only equivalent if "the password" is fixed and can be used for an indefinite series of "first" connections. In contrast, imagine that the thing the guest enters into their laptop is a freshly-generated random code which expires within X minutes and can only be used once.

That would be an improvement, but authentication would still be based on a phishable credential vs a cryptographic assertion, and ultimately exploited in the enterprise environment it was designed for.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#84
post #82

It makes me sad that even WPA3 doesn’t have a native provisioning mechanism. In a better world, a device would present its MAC address, some description of itself, a public key, and optional extra data (e.g. an attestation of the hardware security backing its keypair, and the network operator could, at its leisure, accept this device. Then printers, smart devices, etc could join without needing to each support an MDM…

> It makes me sad that even WPA3 doesn’t have a native provisioning mechanism.

And that's how you get spoofing management frames, deauthing, and all sorts of fun attacks.

Cause the moment you talk to unauthenticated and unencrypted machines, well, yeah. Payday.

So you cant do that, even if you really want to.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#85
post #64

Personally I've essentially given up on depending on WiFi auth for anything important. For general access, segmenting various users, IOT etc for performance, monitoring and light privacy WPA-EAP and PPSKs with VLANs does some work as an initial first layer fine and in a simple reliable way that works with everything. It's a low pass filter. But for all sensitive access I use internal Wireguard now. WiFi auth gets a c…

And here I just deployed 802.1X wireless and wired across our four hospitals. Maybe you’re not doing something right.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the NSA use WiFi at all other than for clandestine collection systems in the field?

Yeah, they put out an article a few years ago talking about how a limited number of SCIFs have WiFi now

Do they broadcast an SSID? They can't have "NotYourSCIF". That's my home network. Someone else is the building is using "FSB_BugsNet". Another local one i see is "CEyeA".

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#89

Do these enterprise modes have any advantages when it comes to connection reliability?

You're not going to increase connection reliability/extend your wifi range by enabling radius. If you have any understanding of what's happening here, you wouldn't even ask this question.

Re: WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode at home

#90

TS information over wifi? Ok. Have fun with that. Im sure it is legally possible somehow, but it just creates a ridiculously large attack surface. And the internal hassles, making sure connected machines are inside defined perimeters ... just run some wires. It isnt like people need to be reading classified stuff on the treadmill.

Erroneous assumptions, half-truths, and a clickbait headline have historically never been a barrier to getting to the top of "Hacker" "News".
Post reply on HN