[PATCH] wpa_supplicant failure in "Server Fail Fallback"

Shahid Mahmood mahmoods at avaya.com
Thu Apr 3 16:54:01 EDT 2014


Hello guys,
Looks like my previous post didn't make it through. Re-posting, please
review ...

The following patch addresses the situation when wpa_supplicant goes into a
failed state in a certain switch configuration.

Some switches, such as those from Juniper Networks, allow a so called
"Server Fail Fallback" mode, in which case, if the RADIUS server is
unreachable, the switch itself makes EAP-Success or EAP-Fail decisions.

Roughly, the transaction looks like this:
1) Switch: ===> EAP-Request-ID
2) Device: ===> EAP-Response-ID
3) Switch: ===> EAP-Success
4) Device goes to a FAILURE state

There is no ‘EAP-Request-MD5/TLS’ coming in from the switch. wpa_supplicant
goes into FAILED state.

I checked the RFC 4137 and the behavior seems to reflect correctly what is
mentioned in Fig 3 "EAP Peer State Machine". I have launched another probe
into that direction. But with current state of the state machine in
wpa_supplicant, thi type of switch configurations are impossible to support.
I have also heard that Cisco switches can also support something like. I
think it is reasonable to expect EAP clients (with wpa_supplicant) to
respond in a meaningful way.

For that, I am proposing the following patch (which has been tested with
this and other common scenarios):
The wpa_suppicant version: 0.5.10, in "wired" mode.

---
commit 0629cd58943cd2ef2aaef0a83ea66aa75c65c4a5
Author: Shahid Mahmood <mahmoods at avaya.com>
Date:   Mon Mar 31 06:47:09 2014 -0700

    [PATCH] Handle RADIUS Failover switch configuration

diff --git a/eap.c b/eap.c
index a5cd982..5afc8c4 100644
--- a/eap.c
+++ b/eap.c
@@ -618,6 +618,12 @@ SM_STEP(EAP)
                    (sm->reqId == sm->lastId ||
                     eap_success_workaround(sm, sm->reqId, sm->lastId)))
                        SM_ENTER(EAP, SUCCESS);
+/* >> AVAYA - Handle switch "Failover", when Success is sent without authentica
+               else if (sm->rxSuccess && !sm->rxFailure && !sm->rxReq && (sm->r
+               {
+                  SM_ENTER(EAP, SUCCESS);
+               }
+/* << AVAYA */
                else if (sm->methodState != METHOD_CONT &&
                         ((sm->rxFailure &&
                           sm->decision != DECISION_UNCOND_SUCC) ||
---

shahid (mahmoods at avaya.com)
Avaya Inc, Canada



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