Jake,
You're asking the right questions and clearly you've hit the
same stumbling block most of us have. My answer to you would be that it
depends on your environment. There are plenty of examples of places
that let the WiFi be clear and authenticate folks at a gateway of some
sort, or even at the wired port on a smart network. Some of those
solutions offer encryption, some use VPN to provide authentication and
encryption. Some only do authentication as most of their traffic (or
important traffic) is encrypted.
It's a matter of what works best for you and what your risk
aversion is. For example with unencrypted wireless and no other
encryption and some simple authentication (i.e. once per session web
portal only) you may be more vulnerable to someone pretending to be one
of your wireless clients in a man in the middle type scenario. But how
likely is this really...
We've chosen currently to have Clean Access running in an out of
band solution to provide a database of MAC addresses that we know are
safe. It provides also captive portal and ACL for our Guest Wireless.
Right now the Wired network relies on MAC authentication and our
wireless relies on 802.1x for user and computer authentication.
Wireless will eventually do a MAC lookup as well.
Mike
Michael Ruiz
Network and Systems Engineer, ESSE ACP A+
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
-----Original Message-----
From: Barros, Jacob [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 9:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Newbie
I am having trouble making two technology concepts mesh. We are looking
at implementing Bradford Campus Manager and at the same time considering
Aruba... speaking of encryption. So my question is two fold... Do
those of you that are using a solution like Aruba's or Bluesocket's have
a Campus Manager, Clean Access solution or SafeConnect solution? If so,
is there really a point in requiring authentication for wireless?
Jake Barros
Grace College
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