How to unit test 802.1X WiFi connection with eapol_test ?

22 Oct 2026

      Hello,

I've got a Freeradius instance on a debian 13 host. It is used as a
backend with a (rather old) Unifi WPA2 Entreprise. WiFi rely on
PEAP/MSCHAPv2.

My goal is to unit test connections from an Android device. I'm using
the followiing script on the debian 13:

cat > ${TMP_CFG} << EOF
network={
    ssid="${SSID}"
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    eap=PEAP
    identity="${CLIENT_ID2}"
    password="${CLIENT_PWD}"
    phase2="autheap=MSCHAPV2"
    ca_cert="${SYSTEM_CA_CERT}"
    domain_match="${DOMAIN}"
}
EOF
eapol_test -v -c ${TMP_CFG} -a ${SERVER_IP} -A  ${SERVER_IP} -s
${RADIUS_SECRET} >> ${LOG_FILE}

Last line returns 0 as exit code.

Now with my smartphone, I must disable CA Certificate validation to
successfully connect to WiFi.

1. What do you think of the above script ? Can I use it reliably to
test WiFi connections from Android, Windows, iOS and MacOS devices ?

2. What could explain difference between live testing with a real
Android device and the above script ?

Best regards

How to unit test 802.1X WiFi connection with eapol_test ?

Olivier