Questions on Free Radius with Shared Secret and special characters

[Alan DeKok]

On Mar 23, 2023, at 12:52 PM, Tammy Dore via Freeradius-Users <freeradius-users at lists.freeradius.org> wrote:
> We upgraded from a previous version of Free Radius v3.0.19.  Recently we have had some complains that some special characters which used to work in our previous release, no longer work.  So far I have discovered that these special characters do not work: , ; '

  Hmm... if only there was some way to actually tell what happened when you used special characters.  Perhaps some kind of debug output, or error message.  Oh well, I guess it's a complete mystery,

> So which known special characters are not supported?  Do I need to use an escape sequence in front of the special character to make it work?  I saw a blog that mentioned the correct_escapes setting in radiusd.conf can be used to correct the problem with special characters.  So does setting correct_escapes = false, will that allow a secret with "testing123\," to work?

  The server supports single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings when setting values for "secret".  The normal rules for single / double-quoted strings apply.

  There is no magic.  The ',' and ';' characters are not special.  And when anything goes wrong, it gives a descriptive error message.

  Alan DeKok.