Any way to do virtual 802.1x inside Linux?

A. Trevelyan

10/18/23, 10:25 PM

I'm trying to test out 802.1x in a virtual environment but I haven't been able to find any good resources/guides on how to do that.

The scenario is something like this:

I have a Linux host machine (OS: ubuntu jammy) with a couple of lxc containers running
Both of the containers are connected to a linux bridge, so they can communicate with each other directly. (like a miniature 2-node network inside the main machine)
One of the containers is running FreeRadius
I want the other other container to authenticate itself to the network using the first (radius) container as the authentication server, so i can be able to play around with things like EAP-TLS and various 802.1x capabilities and see how it looks.

hostapd says it can be used as an authenticator, but all the guides and videos I've been able to find online only talk about using it to set up a linux machine as a wireless access point or hotspot - never any mention of just using hostapd to authenticate itself on a wired network.

I understand that this isn't an ideal setup and in the real world you would probably want this functionality offloaded to the switch instead of being on the client, but for testing purposes - can it be done?

300

0 + 2

radius

linux-networking

lxc

802.1x

larsks

10/18/23, 11:12 PM

[This question](https://superuser.com/questions/1059987/how-can-i-quickly-set-up-a-lab-with-802-1x-wired-authentication-without-a-swit) seems to have links to examples of setting up the server side, and [this article](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Network802.1xAuthentication) shows how to set up wpa_supplicant for a wired connection.

A. Trevelyan

10/19/23, 4:20 PM

Thanks, I'll go through these and see if there's anything I can use or if I have to scrap my setup and do it like they describe.

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