Miskatonic University Press

Getting my Raspberry Pi on a PEAP-MSCHAPv2 wifi network

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I have a Raspberry Pi at work that I use for listening to STAPLR. A while ago it fell off the university’s wifi network. Today I got around to fixing that. For some unknown reason I had to do more today than I did back when I first got it on the wifi, but such is the way of computers. For my own sake I’m documenting what I did here, and maybe it will be useful to others.

This is based on: Raspberry Pi 3 and PEAP-MSCHAPv2 WiFi Networks by Nontas Rontogiannis and an answer in a Raspberry Pi forum by broo0oose. Thank you, fellow Pi users who are on not on a simple wifi network!

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First edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add:

network={
      ssid=""
      priority=1
      proto=RSN
      key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
      pairwise=CCMP
      auth_alg=OPEN
      eap=PEAP
      identity=
      password=hash:
      phase1="peaplabel=0"
      phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
      }

Fill in these fields:

  • ssid (wifi network name)
  • identity (username)
  • password

You can enter your password in plain text, but that’s a terrible thing to do. Instead, use a hashed version.

echo -n 'password_in_plaintext' | iconv -t utf16le | openssl md4 > hash.txt

Then take the text in hash.txt and add it after “hash:” in the password field.

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Restart network services (sudo service networking restart) and all should work … unless you don’t have a /etc/network/interfaces file, which I didn’t! Somehow it had disappeared. So I created one, with this incantation:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
        post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

(That’s a tab for indentation there, in case it matters. The pre-up line should be all on the same line, it’s -c/etc/wpa..., but some formatting thing is messing up the display here.)

After rebooting it all worked, even though the network icon in the icon bar showed no connection.

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Typing in your password means it’s in your history, which means it’s in a file on the system. That’s insecure. The easiest way to clear that out is to wipe your history:

history -c

But you can also just wipe out the one line by finding just which one it is, for example:

$ history | grep openssl
  118  echo -n 'password_in_plaintext' | iconv -t utf16le | openssl md4 > hash.txt
$ history -d 118

But when you’re on the network you should install xsel:

sudo apt-get install xsel

Now next time you can run

echo -n 'password_in_plaintext' | iconv -t utf16le | openssl md4 | xsel -b

This puts the hashed password into the X clipboard, where it’s easier to paste. You’ll still want to wipe it from your history.

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Why the Pi doesn’t support this kind of network out of the box, I don’t know, but I hope they add it. Nevertheless, the Pi is marvellous little thing.