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Patrick Allaert
Asked: 2020-03-28 11:57:41 +0800 CST

Can a Linux box be configured with IEEE 802.1x while grabbing the info from a Windows box?

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A managed Windows device can join the wired network of my corporate company, while a personal Linux one can't.

As far as I understand, this is possible thanks to IEEE 802.1x standard.

Looking at the configuration, a computer certificate is used and I managed to get access to the private key located under ...\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys and its corresponding certificate.

Questions are:

  1. Is it possible given those elements?
  2. Private key seems to be in a binary format I don't recognise, this should probably be converted to some DER/PEM format for Linux's NetworkManager? If so, how?
windows linux 802.1 networkmanager eap

1 Answers

  1. For 802.1x you commonly need wpa_supplicant on Linux. I guess, theoretically there could be other software too, but in practice you'd probably use supplicant.

    Or NetworkManager, which uses wpa_supplicant internally. Then you wouldn't directly care about supplicant. Assuming you use NetworkManager, you'd create a connection profile of type ethernet with 801-1x settings. For example, using nmcli or nm-connection-editor GUI.

    I am not sure about the certificate format. For testing, you could omit the certificate and not do any authentication. Of course, once you see that it works in principle, configure the certificates. See man nm-settings for the 802-1x properties.

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