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wireless PEAP with EAP-MSCHAP v2 authentication - certificate spoof possible?

Greetings,

I have a Cisco/Microsoft Wireless security question that's pretty in-depth. I'm hoping there's someone out there who's been down this road. Specifically I'm curious how strong this setup is in deflecting a targeted evil-twin man-in-the-middle access point attack against our employees (i.e. bad guy in airport or starbucks setting up an access point trying to get an employee machine to associate to it and get the machine to volunteer the active directory username/password).

Our networking vendor is spec'ing a wireless system for a large facility, and intends to use Cisco Aironet infrastructure, and leveraging PEAP authentication against our Microsoft Active directory suing username/passwords. All our client machines are Windows XP systems.

Their technical guy showed in a demo that Windows would be configured for WPA/TKIP using 802.1x authentication using PEAP, and EAP-MSCHAP v2 as the authentication mechanism which'll go against our active directory infrastructure.

Client systems (for our wireless workstations) will be set up to validate the access point's certificate which they intend to use an [name of a listed certificate authority] authority certificate for this. Perhaps this picture helps, where only one trusted root CA would be checked in our configuration:

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The benefit they say is that we won't have to install any client side certificates which will simplify management quite a bit but, here's where the big question of security comes...

In this setup, would it be possible for an attacker to set up an evil twin access point if they take the time to purchase their own certificate from that same certificate authority?

My understanding may be flawed, but I don't see that the client checks anything except that the access point has a matching BSSID and posesses a valid certificate from that certificate authority. I don't see where it does any checking to make sure that it's actually our company's individual certificate.

Can anyone confirm or deny?

I guess I'd hate for someone with a laptop sitting at an airport being able to coax one of our employees' machines into joining his network automatically if he just knew out BSSID and had a certificate from the same CA. It may be an acceptable level of risk to balance out the management headache or client side certificates, but I just want to be sure we know what the exposure is so we can do a proper risk assessment.

Best Regards,

Reply to
Todd H.
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Hi Todd,

When dealing with digital certificates it is all about established trust.

There is a chain linked to all certificates that leads back to the main certificate authority.

If you "trust" that authority as having done their job then you assume they have verified the certificate owner because there are digital certificate links that lead back to the top authority.

If you do not trust them then you can get a certificate from another authority, perhaps even setup your own root authority that is 802.1x compliant.

Actually, even Microsoft provides this type of solution.

With 802.1x you cannot only authenticate the access point, but you can authenticate the end points and users as well.

In addition, the 802.1x leads into network access control (NAC) solutions and this is the true direction mature organizations should be heading.

Courtesy of CompuCom Systems Network Security Expert, Andrew R. Reese:

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Hope this helps.

Brad Reese BradReese.Com - Cisco Repair

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Hendersonville Road, Suite 17 Asheville, North Carolina USA 28803 USA & Canada: 877-549-2680 International: 828-277-7272 Fax: 775-254-3558 AIM: R2MGrant BradReese.Com - Cisco Power Supply Headquarters
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Reply to
www.BradReese.Com

Hi Brad, thanks for your response. Let's assume we trust the certificate authority in question to verify that someone is who they say they are.

I guess my question boils down to this: Does PEAP (using only server side certificates) really give a client any assurance that they're connecting to their company's access point, or does it only guarantee that they're connecting to an access point where the owner has purchased a certificate from a given CA?

As a recap, we're talking about the sitation where the client is configured like this, with exactly one of the Microsoft listed Trusted Root CA's checked in this dialog box:

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I'm thinking a bad guy, knowing only what CA a Big Company uses, could cheerfully purchase a certificate in his own name or his own company's name, the CA would do their job and verify who he is and all, and then head down to the airport with his laptop and see what laptops from Big Company he could get to autojoin his access point because I suspect that this method isn't checking the content of the certificate other than for validity and for a trusted CA.

Or am I all wet?

Reply to
Todd H.

You need to check the "Connect to these servers" box and specify the domain name under which the server certificates were issued.

Otherwise, as you say, any access point with a valid server certificate issued to any name whatsoever would pass the "is the access point who it says it is" test.

You need to know "is the access point who it says it is" along with "does it say that it is MYCOMPANYNAME.COM".

Reply to
briggs

I think you can issue the certificates to the workstations via group policy. If I understand you scenario properly.

Reply to
Chad Mahoney

Gotcha. That's what I suspected--glad to have a confirmation of how this works.

Now, given that the company uses different server names depending on location, that might get a little tricky to roll into our big master workstation build.

Or does it allow for wildcarding of *.mycompanyname.com?

Thanks again for the responses.

Reply to
Todd H.

Hi Chad, thanks for the response-- that would definitely simplify the certificate distribution issue quite a bit. I'm intrigued.

In that case, instead of configuring the standard workstation build to use PEAP/EAP-MSCHAP v2 with a CA that's already "on the list" if you will, are you saying we could use group policy to install our own specific mycompany certificate, and then direct the 802.1x authentication to only trust that CA here?

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Or am I getting CA's and certificates confused and this approach would move us away from PEAP into EAP-TLS, and specifying certificate this way:

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If what I've read is to believed, EAP-TLS is the most secure way to do things, but folks shy away from it because it requires a certificate to be put on the client box. Personally, if getting the cert there is as simple as pushing it via group policy, and making the first login to a domain controller be over a wired connection, that'd be a good tradeoff from where I sit.

Let me know if I'm smelling the stew yer cookin correctly on this. :-) Thanks for the input!

Best Regards,

Reply to
Todd H.

Hi Todd,

Recommend that you check out Verisign's FAQ section and review what kinds of digital certificates are available for purchase, and then review what the requirements are to get these digital certificates assigned.

As stated earlier, it is about trusting the certificate authorities.

If you do not trust the root authorities to properly check the credentials of someone before handing out a digital certificate in some companies name, then setup your own root server and architect it from there.

Am sure the root authorities post their policies and procedures for ensuring the integrity of their root servers.

The client has the responsibility for accepting the validity of what ever certificates are presented to them, they need to verify the chain of trust back to the root server and they need to make sure the digital certificate they have for the root server is valid.

Sincerely,

Brad Reese BradReese.Com - Cisco Network Engineer Directory

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Reply to
www.BradReese.Com

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Check out

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and this
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I would assume you could create a policy per OU based on location and deploy the certs. I have only configured this in a single org. setup and the certs were distributed with no problem.

HTH

Reply to
Chad Mahoney

That's true, but not applicable to the scenario I'm posing.

I'm trying to explore suppose a completely legitimate, non-forged certificate is purchased in the attacker's name, and is associated the the rogue access point. The real and rogue AP's will have different certificates, but both certs are from teh same CA. Will PEAP EAP/MSCHAP v2 as implemented in Windows XP sp2's built in PEAP supplicant ever tell the user about the certitificate or not, or will it quietly and happily connect to the rogue access point since it has a cert from the trusted CA?

For the purposes of this, assume the "Connect to these servers" field of this dialog is blank, and one CA of the trust list is selected to trust:

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Right. I couldn't agree more.

But, my question is "Will the microsoft PEAP supplicant even ask the user to okay the certificate that is presented, or will it quietly accept it because it came from the trusted CA?"

Thanks again for your input!

Best Regards,

Reply to
Todd H.

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