802.1x EAP-SIM support?

Software SW help
1

Hi,

I’m a happy owner of a Turris Omnia router (TurrisOS 5.0.4) and live in France.
My ISP is “FreeSaS” and i am using the Omnia as my home router through the DMZ of the “freebox” modem.
Lately i experienced several internet outage and tried to figure out what i could use for a backup connection.
FreeSaS allow owners of their contract to get for free a limited phone plan (sim card to buy) and has setup for all of their mobile phone customers a free unlimited wifi access named “freewifi_secure”.
The only trick is that to join this freewifi_secure you have to use the security 802.1x EAP with the EAP option being EAP-SIM.
I don’t know the details but it seems that the security protocol makes several handshakes between the simcard and the wifi hotspot to authenticate properly without the need of sharing a passphrase.

It is something that people usually do with a smartphone, and starting from android 8 (i think) it shall be given as an option when you try to add manually a wifi network.

The thing is my phone is not compatible EAP-SIM and i cannot put more than android 7 with an already unofficial rom. I know it could probably work if i change my phone, but i don’t especially like to use extra piece of hardware (with battery and cable) when i don’t need one. Anyway, connecting that phone with usb on the omnia is not an option in the present case.

On the other hand, the omnia possess a sim card slot to connect with 4G LTE…
In my case i don’t need the 4G LTE connection since the real source of data will be the wifi accesspoint freewifi_secure.
I actually need the simcard slot only for the purpose of wifi 802.1x EAP-SIM protocol, in order to connect on wifi with the wifi antennas.

so my question, is is there a way to add such support on the Luci interface of the Omnia? so far when you add manually a wifi network, in client mode, you can only select WPA or WPA2 based protocols. and the closest would be WPA-EAP or WPA2-EAP, but in the EAP security selection there is no EAP-SIM either.

is it something that we can expect from Turris through an official request? or we have to do it all by ourselves?

i tried to find a package in software that match EAP-SIM but i haven’t found any on the repository.
i also haven’t found any package dealing with EAP-xxx to update the Luci interface with new options (like freeradius3 suite) so i suppose it is for something else than the omnia setup.

i have seen that some other ISP in other countries use the EAP-SIM, so if it’s something that could be used by more people that’s better

sorry in advance if i haven’t respected all the good practice for this message, that’s because that’s the first one i write ^_^". But i already checked at least that this question has never been answered, easy there is no mention of EAP-SIM nowhere on this forum.

Thanks in advance for any reply

2

It been discussed in upstream’s user forum https://forum.openwrt.org/t/bug-wpa-supplicant-eap-sim-aka-support-compile-error/46771

1 Like
3

thx, i recall having found this forum before, but since it wasn’t an official luci integration, i didn’t pay too much attention.

does it mean that to get such thing supported i need to compile by myself the kernel/luci/firmware and run it instead of the official turris one? and eap-sim will be automatically integrated in luci interface?

i wonder how many people actually run their own version of the turris OS? and if it remains fully compatible with the official packages updates or if one need to compile them all as well.

if it is as common as recompiling a linux kernel for a PC then it’s ok i guess (even though few people would do that nowadays ; with the usage of modules the kernel automatically adjust itself with the user needs)
but if it is too troublesome/out of the charts it may be more safe to wait for an official support ^_^"

4

Unless the TOS developers would decide to support it, for which you could raise an issue in their repository, the functionality would have to be implemented upstream (OpenWrt) and thus it might be best to discourse the matter at their forum, it might yield a more satisfactory response.

5

that makes sense, i start to understand the structure of all this, thanks :slight_smile: