CycloneEAP
Embedded 802.1X / EAP Library

CycloneEAP is a 802.1X / EAP library dedicated to embedded applications. 802.1X standard specifies a protocol that prevents unauthorized access to a corporate LAN, by providing port-level authentication. The 802.1X protocol relies on EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) to manage various authentication methods, such as username/password and digital certificates.

CycloneEAP is available either as open source (GPLv2 license) or under a royalty-free commercial license (non-GPL license). We also propose an evaluation license (90-day license in source form) with technical support for an easier onboarding and effective evaluation of our software.

An 802.1X architecture involves 3 parties: a supplicant, an authenticator, and an authentication server.

• The supplicant is a client device which wants to be authenticated.
• The authenticator acts as a proxy between the client and the authentication server and controls the authorized/unauthorized state of the port. It is typically implemented on Ethernet switches.
• The authentication server (generally a RADIUS server) verifies user's credentials and instructs the authenticator to authorize network access for the user.

Main Features

• 802.1X supplicant implementation
• Supports password-based authentication using EAP-MD5
• Supports X.509 certificate-based mutual authentication using EAP-TLS
• Supports TLS 1.3 with EAP-TLS (RFC 9190)
• 802.1X authenticator implementation in pass-through mode
• Supports RADIUS over UDP (RFC 2865)
• IEEE8021-PAE-MIB to remotely manage and monitor the authenticator
• Flexible memory footprint. Built-time configuration to embed only the necessary features
• Portable architecture (no processor dependencies)
• The library is distributed as a full ANSI C and highly maintainable source code

Supported Authentication Methods

• EAP-MD5 (RFC 3748)
• EAP-TLS (RFC 5216)