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The third question is particularly important these days because some popular operating systems, particularly Android ones, do not allow to verify the expected server name. For such operating systems, using a commercial CA for the server certificate opens up a loophole for fraud: anyone with a valid certificate from this CA, regardless of the name in the certificate, can pretend to be the eduroam authentication server for your end-user; which ultimately means the end-user device will send the user's login credentials to that unauthorised third-party. If you use a self-signed certificate or private CA however, which issues only one/very few certificates, and over which you have full control, then no unauthorised third party will be able to get a certificate in the first place, and thus can't fraud your users.

Another factor to consider when making the decision private vs. commercial CA is that of size and length of the EAP conversation during every login: with a private CA, you will be able to construct a certificate chain without intermediary CA certificates; requiring less bytes to be transmitted inside the EAP conversation (see Consideration 3, below). This results in fewer EAP round-trips and thus a faster authentication.

So, as a general recommendation: if you have the required expertise, it is suggested to set up a private CA exclusively for your IdP's eduroam service. This CA should have a very long lifetime to prevent certificate rollover problems. The CA should issue only server certificates for your eduroam IdP server(s). If you do not have that expertise, you should make use of your NROs special-purpose CA if it exists. If none of these work for you, a certificate from a commercial CA is the third option.

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End-user devices need to verify the server certificate. They do this by having a known set of trustworthy anchors, the "Trusted Root Certificates". These root certificates need to be available and activated on the device prior to starting the eduroam login. Therefore, it does not serve any useful purpose to send the root CA certificate itself inside the RADIUS/EAP conversation. It is not harmful to send it anyway though, except that it unnecessarily inflates the data exchange, which means more round-trips during eduroam authentication, and in turn a slower login experience. One possible exception is: there are reports of certain Blackberry devices for which it is advantqageous to send the root CA certificate nontheless; if you expect you need/want to support Blackberry devices, sending the root CA may be of help.

During the EAP conversation, the eduroam IdP RADIUS server always needs to send its server certificate.

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