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05.17.07
The 802.1X Supplicant Initiative
 By
Steve Duplessie
First let me state that those are words I barely understand, and until recently have never even used the word "supplicant", correctly or otherwise.
Having said that, kudos to Jon Oltsik for seeing a wrong in the world of IT and doing something about it. It turns out that some big guys bought some little guys and because of that, other big guys were about to have to create their own proprietary ways to provide basic security connectivity features for their edge products. No one really cared about giving a few bucks to Funk software (bought by Juniper) or to Meetinghouse (bought by Cisco), or using Microsoft's implementation when it was all but free, and really, who cares about Funk or Meetinghouse? When Cisco buys one and then Juniper the other, the picture changes. Since other big guys don't want to A: pay competitors and B: support the competitive cause, the only way around ending up with another batch of confusing, proprietary IT problems was to get everyone on board with an open source standard. There is no value in having a proprietary way to connect to something, but there are a ton of potential problems with having to do so.
Here are some FAQ's from their site - www.openseaalliance.org
What work is the alliance undertaking?
The initial effort will be to support the development of a robust open-source 802.1X supplicant.
What is 802.1X?
802.1X is an IEEE standard providing port authentication in LANs. It has since been used extensively in 802.11 wireless security and is a part of WPA. It is increasingly seeing use in wired Ethernet environments as well. The 802.1X specification provides an authentication framework enabling endpoint devices to be authenticated by a central authentication service. The 802.1X specification uses the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) for exchanging messages as part of the authentication process.
What is an 802.1X supplicant?
An 802.1X supplicant acts as the client side of a client/server authentication handshake. When an 802.1X supplicant tries to access a network, it is challenged for authentication credentials by an 802.1X authenticator (typically an Ethernet switch or Wireless Access Point). The supplicant and authenticator then exchange authentication credentials over a particular type of EAP (i.e. PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS). When the supplicant provides authentication credentials, the authenticator forward them on to an authentication server via the RADIUS protocol for verification. If the authentication credentials are valid, the authentication server sends an "accepted" message to the authenticator which then grants network access to the supplicant.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Steve Duplessie is the author of the "Steve's IT Rants" blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.
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