Optional viewing: Manual network configuration for lab use – EAP-TLS for Windows

Configure a Windows device to use a certificate to authenticate– again, still talking about the lab use cases where you need to manually install a certificate, manually connect a device to the network. So we have our test lab client certificate with the CA cert embedded. We have our Mist certificate we’ve exported from the Mist dashboard previously.

So we’re going to take those two files. We’re going to copy them. We’ll move over to our Windows machine. We’re just going to paste those two files. So now we will install the client certificate. It is going to be installed as a user certificate. Click Next, put in the import password, confirm installation, and then install the Mist certificate as the trusted certification authority.

So we could do– here, we’re going to install it as a trusted route certification authority.

Next click Finish.

And we have installed our CA cert. Now the next step is to configure a profile on the Windows device to connect to our SSID using EAP-TLS using our client certificates. So now– by the way, if we want to validate that the client certificate has installed, we could search for certificate manager, go to personal certificates.

We now have our test certificate installed that we’ve created in the previous step, assigned by our lab CA.

You could see it right there.

So now we will create a manual network profile. So we’ll go to Control Panel.

We’ll go to Network and Sharing Center.

We’ll click on Setup a new connection or network. We’ll select Manually connect to a wireless network. We’ll put in our SSID name.

Security type will be WPA3 enterprise, right?

Don’t start this connection automatically just yet. Let’s click Next. Change connection settings, that’s important. We’ll then go to Security. So we’ll change the default PIP for smart card or other cert EAP-TLS.

we’ll go to Settings. We’ll then select the Mist certificate we’ve just imported.

This is for the client to trust the Mist authentication service. Again, this is about the mutual authentication piece.

We will then click OK.

We’ll go to Advanced Settings.

And we’ll use user authentication, because we have a user certificate, in our case.

Click OK. Click OK. Click Close.

We’ll go– Select Turn on Wi-Fi.

We’ll connect to our Mist secure net SSID. We’ll select our certificate. That’s the certificate we’ve imported. Click OK. And our client device is connected.