pap/peap confusion

Michael Griego mgriego at utdallas.edu
Wed Feb 14 21:24:33 CET 2007


On Feb 14, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Matt Ashfield wrote:

> During a pap conversation, the radius server ends up with the
> username/password passed to it from the client. It then encrypts the
> password to match the encryption of the stored password in ldap (or  
> other
> directory) and tries a bind. Correct?

There are two methods when it comes to LDAP, bind or compare.  In the  
bind option, as used when "ldap" is in the authenticate section, does  
not encrypt the password received from the client, it just uses that  
in an LDAP bind operation and checks the return status for success or  
failure.  In the compare option, as would be used if you retrieved  
the password hash from LDAP during the authorize phase and used the  
PAP module in the authenticate section, the password hash is actually  
*retrieved* from LDAP and compared against the password retrieved  
from the client (possibly encrypting the password from the client to  
see if the hashes match in the case of an encrypted password stored  
in LDAP).

> During a PEAP conversation, the radius server also would end-up with a
> username/password received from the client (either via clear-text  
> or via the
> mschap conversation). Why can it not then encrypt the password just  
> like PAP
> did? Does it do the comparison to LDAP stored passwords via MSCHAP  
> as well?

That depends on the inner authentication.  During what most people  
thing of as PEAP, which is PEAP with EAP-MSCHAPv2 inside the tunnel,  
the RADIUS server does not received a password for the user.  Rather,  
it received a hash based on information previously sent by the RADIUS  
server.  Since it is not receiving the actual password from the  
client, there is no way to translate what it receives into what would  
be needed to do a comparison or bind using the pap or ldap modules.   
You *can* store a plain-text password or an NTLM-hashed password in  
your LDAP tree to be used by rlm_mschap for the EAP-MSCHAPv2 portion  
of the conversation, but that's pretty much your only choice when  
dealing with LDAP (and is what we do).

--Mike



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