The fragmentation issue that Heikki mentions is specific to EAP over RADIUS, 
where RADIUS is using UDP transport. It isn’t a property of EAP itself, and so 
I don’t follow why this makes EAP impractical for IoT.

 

Josh

 

From: Emu <emu-boun...@ietf.org> On Behalf Of Behcet Sarikaya
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2023 9:39 PM
To: Heikki Vatiainen <h...@radiatorsoftware.com>
Cc: iot-director...@ietf.org; draft-ietf-ace-wg-coap-eap....@ietf.org; 
e...@ietf.org; ace@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Emu] [Ace] [suspect] Re: Iotdir early review of 
draft-ietf-ace-wg-coap-eap-08

 

+1 to Heikki.

 

I think the use of AAA, in particular EAP for IoT is simply not practical, 
thanks to Heikki for making this specific.

It could be theoretically beautiful though :)

 

Behcet

 

On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 7:08 AM Heikki Vatiainen <h...@radiatorsoftware.com 
<mailto:h...@radiatorsoftware.com> > wrote:

On Wed, 19 Jul 2023 at 11:45, Dan Garcia Carrillo <garcia...@uniovi.es 
<mailto:garcia...@uniovi.es> > wrote:

 

On 5/7/23 15:36, Alan DeKok wrote:

 

>    Given that the EAP packets can be forced to be no more than 1024 octets, 
> the only difference between EAP methods is the number of packets exchanged, 
> and the total amount of data exchanged.  Current EAP supplicants and 
> authenticators limit the total number of exchanges to 50 or 100, depending on 
> various factors.
>
>    Is there a similar limit for CoAP?  i.e. will CoAP go fail if there is 64K 
> of data being exchanged in EAP?


We tried not to go there in the document, just to acknowledge that CoAP 
fits the requirements for an EAP lower layer. In any case, EAP messages 
larger than 1024 could be sent using CoAP Block-wise transfer, that will 
seamlessly take care of sending payloads larger than CoAP Minimum MTU.

 

A couple of additional notes about EAP authentication exchange and its data use.

 

First, if look at EAP-TTLS and PEAP but not EAP-TLS, it may seem that the 
authentication exchange is very asymmetric in how it uses data. The EAP server 
sends a long certificate chain and the client sends very little with many of 
client responses being just simple ACKs that tell the server to continue.

 

EAP-TLS, especially with TLSv1.2 and earlier, uses plenty of data for both 
directions. EAP servers know how to fragment the data but clients sometimes may 
attempt to send messages that get fragmented by the lower layer and may get 
lost in transit (firewalls etc. being a problem). The problem with clients is 
typically that there may not be a setting or a method that tells the client to 
use a certain EAP message size. In other words, EAP-TLS, for example, supports 
fragmentation, but the clients especially may now know how small the fragment 
needs to be when they send out their client certificate and its associated CA 
certificate chain.

 

Some EAP methods, such as PEAP and EAP-TTLS allow running EAP-TLS as the inner 
authentication method, which means you have TLS within TLS and client 
fragmentation becomes even more complex. Servers typically know how to handle 
this too. This is not the most common thing to do, but with TLSv1.2 is the 
method to hide client certificate information when using EAP-TLS.

 

To summarise: with EAP-TLS there is typically large amount of data transferred 
in both directions.

 

With TLSv1.3 it's possible to omit the CA certificates: 

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8446#section-4.4.2

 

    ... a certificate that specifies a trust anchor MAY be

   omitted from the chain ...

 

This can be a large size saver, but please see the whole paragraph too. The CA 
certificates (trust anchors) would need to be know be the other TLS endpoint if 
this is done. This is yet another good reason to use TLSv1.3 even though 
TLSv1.2 and earlier still remain in wide use with TLS based EAP methods.

 

-- 

Heikki Vatiainen
h...@radiatorsoftware.com <mailto:h...@radiatorsoftware.com> 

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