Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains in TLS-Based EAP Methods

The Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), defined in RFC 3748, provides a standard mechanism for support of multiple authentication methods. EAP-TLS and other TLS-based EAP methods are widely deployed and used for network access authentication. Large certificates and long certificate chains combined with authenticators that drop an EAP session after only 40 - 50 round trips is a major deployment problem. This document looks at this problem in detail and describes the potential solutions available.