Eduroam Wi-Fi Authentication Failing at non-Northwestern Locations

eduroam is a federated Wi-Fi network that provides secure and easy internet access for users around the world. You can access the eduroam network at educational/research institutions, K-12 schools, libraries, museums, and even transportation hubs using the authentication certificates issued to your device here at Northwestern. More information is available at https://eduroam.org/

Because of the distributed nature of the eduroam authentication infrastructure, as well as local technical limitations, eduroam users who are at non-Northwestern locations may encounter occasional instances where their connection attempts are unsuccessful. This may manifest as error messages that say that authentication was denied, internet access is not available, or that a Wi-Fi connection could not be made. 

Users who experience these problems should first report them to the technical support organization for the location. If it is determined that the problem is due to some issue on the Northwestern side, the report should be forwarded to the Northwestern IT Support Center.

Please note that due to the need to exchange data and coordinate any configuration changes between institutions, it is likely that resolution of issues may take longer than normal.

Special Considerations for Northwestern Managed Devices

With the increasing adoption of certificate-based network authentication, an issue has been observed where Northwestern owned and managed devices may not be able to authenticate to eduroam at a number of remote institutions. This is because the authentication servers at those institutions have not been configured to accept the types of certificates that are issued by the central device management platforms. Northwestern IT has worked with some of these institutions to change the configuration on their authentication servers, which has resolved the issue. If you are encountering this problem, please open a ticket with the Northwestern IT Support Center with the name of the institution, the MAC (Media Access Control) hardware address of your device, and the date/time of your connection attempt, and we will reach out to the IT staff at the other institution to discuss this with them.