Wireless Provisioning Service Protocol

[Artur Hecker]

hi Josh


sorry to catch up so late on this.

> I mean EAP over RADIUS within a roaming consortium. A good example  
> of one, which I'm involved in, is eduroam (www.eduroam.org).

i took a look at this, it is mostly TERENA stuff for RADIUS... imho  
it only concerns the provider-provider interface and has nothing to  
do with WPS from my point of view. sorry, i don't see the point or  
the relevance of eduroam inter-provider agreements for the client  
provisioning.


> Most of the effort in WPS is expended in provisioning configuration  
> stuff (SSID names, etc). But it's reasonably trivial for a roaming  
> consortium to agree on these without requiring a protocol like WPS

yes, it targets the user-provider interface.

i'm sorry, but it is all but trivial to agree upon something like  
this in any realistic commercial roaming consortium. why? first of  
all, because roaming contracts are way too complicated and barely  
applicable for most of the current WISPs. second, because SSIDs etc.  
as almost anything in WiFi is not normative at all, ie. anybody can  
use whatever he wants and the problem is that is what the people  
currently do. change it a posteriori is too complicated.

finally and most importantly, as a user you have no guarantee that  
the SSID you see represent the service you believe to get. and if you  
see two different SSIDs both belonging to commercial hotspots, you  
have to be able to find out service particularities _before_  
connecting to the network. no aggrement can accomplish that for  
802.1X based systems.

and i won't even touch the platform integrity discussion...


ciao
artur