Mac Authentication - what happens after session timeout

[Gunther Mayer]

lc wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Why does coova-chilli (SVN 167) not retry a mac-authentication after a 
> mac-authenticated session has timed out (or was manually closed)?
> Only when the client removes his DHCP connection (during an active 
> session) and reestablishes it later chilli tries again to 
> mac-authenticate him.
>
> Is this a bug? If it isn't, what are the thoughts behind this behavior?
As far as I can tell from the code the mac authentication (be it through 
radius or locally) only happens during establishment of the dhcp 
connection. Once the connection has been initiated no re-authentication 
occurs so what you observe seems consistent.

To answer your question, I do think that's a bug, I just don't know how 
that could be solved as mac-authenticated clients don't explicitly 
trigger any sorts of events, i.e. no user interaction happens for 
authentication, other than the initial dhcp request. Triggering a radius 
auth for every packet that gets routed to the Internet perhaps? But that 
might be way too inefficient...

Gunther