eduroam Report Networkshop 39

Introduction

eduroam was a great success at this year’s Networkshop 39 conference which took place at University of Hertfordshire in April. On the busiest day there were individuals from 88 organisations making use of the service, with 237 devices gaining authentication.

RADIUS Traffic Stats

Summary of daily authentication traffic counts are as follows:

	Access-Requests	Access-Accepts	Access-Rejects	Calling-Station-Identifier	Sites
Mon	1710	1608	102	70	35
Tues	4203	3438	765	206	80
Weds	8288	6897	1391	237	88
Thurs	2790	2152	638	194	82

RadSec

Of particular note is the fact that for the Networkshop event, the RADIUS authentication traffic transport between Hertfordshire and the national RADIUS proxy servers utilised RadSec (RADIUS over TLS and TCP). This was possible because both the NRPS and Hertfordshire’s ORPS employ Radiator RADIUS server software which at present is the only platform that supports RadSec. Apart from the benefit of encryption of the username, and the elimination of the possibility of spoofing the RADIUS server handling authentication traffic that you get with RADIUS over TLS, the fact that RADIUS traffic was carried over TCP rather than UDP meant that the reliability of RADIUS communications was improved. (TCP provides a guarantee of delivery of messages whilst UDP does not.) As RadSec becomes more widely supported by RADIUS platforms (FreeRADIUS), JANET will make the option of RadSec (RADIUS over TLS and TCP) available to a wider range of eduroam participants in the UK.

Naturally not everyone managed to use the service successfully, the detailed stats show that a clutch of users had incorrectly set passwords and we saw the usual range of malformed realm names, no doubt resulting from devices that had not been consciously set up yet which still automatically tried to connect using eduroam!

We would invite feedback from delegates to the conference on their experience of eduroam during the event and any other aspect of the service.

 

Any problems, comments or suggestions regarding this page, please e-mail the eduroam service manager.