Automatically detect 802.1x on wired network and ask for details

[Domen Kožar]

Binary package hint: network-manager

802.1x protocol states, that packet is send periodically to notify clients about 802.1x port security being present. NM should detect that and provide dialog for user to enter credentials.

Currently, credentials need to be manually entered for interface through NM applet configuration. Not really user friendly, without prior knowledge of presence of 802.1x.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

OTOH, 802.1x is not very frequent in networks outside enterprise environments, where you should know about the fact that the connection is secured with 802.1x anyway; or get a preseeded / provisioned system which already takes this into account.

Purely technically, seems to me like going out of our way to listen for 802.1x packets (when we currently don't do so for anything, except the fact that there is a carrier, or maybe dhcp through our dhcp client...) would mean having way more logic than entirely necessary in NM. On the other hand, 802.1x is handled by wpa-supplicant on wired interfaces, not directly NM, so we *could* just run in regardless and maybe ask to be notified if there is a change in security.

Regardless of the concerns expressed above, this is really an upstream issue and should be dealt there. Could you please open a bug report at GNOME (you can follow the instructions here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME), explaining the request so that it could be tackled by the upstream developers? Thanks in advance.

[Domen Kožar (ielectric+)]

Reported upstream, thanks for quick resopnse! https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651348