ZyXEL Communications Prestige 320W Support Notes page 40

P320W Support Notes
1. Force Authorized: Disables 802.1x and causes the port to transition to the authorized state without
any authentication exchange required. The port transmits and receives normal traffic without
802.1x-based authentication of the client. This is the default port control setting. While AP is setup as
Force Authorized, Wireless client (supported 802.1x client or none-802.1x client) can always access the
network.
2. Force Unauthorized: Causes the port to remain in the unauthorized state, ignoring all attempts by the
client to authenticate. The authenticator cannot provide authentication services to the supplicants through
the port. While AP is setup as Force Unauthorized, Wireless clients (supported 802.1x client or
none-802.1x client) never have the access for the network.
3. Auto: Enables 802.1x and causes the port to begin in the unauthorized state, allowing only EAPOL
frames to be sent and received through the port. The authentication process begins when the link state of
the port transitions from down to up, or when an EAPOL-start frame is received requests the identity of
the client and begins relaying authentication messages between supplicant and the authentication server.
Each supplicant attempting to access the network is uniquely identified by the authenticator by using the
client's MAC address. While AP is setup as Auto, only Wireless client supported 802.1x client can access
the network.
Re-Authentication
The administrator can enable periodic 802.1x client re-authentication and specify how often it occurs.
When re-authentication time out, Authenticator will send EAP-Request/ Identity to reinitiate
authentication process.
In ZyXEL Wireless AP 802.1x implementation, if you do not specify a time period before enabling
re-authentication, the number of seconds between re-authentication attempts is 1800 seconds (30
minutes).
EAPOL (Extensible Authentication Protocol over LAN)
Authenticators and supplicants communicate with one another by using the Extensible Authentication
Protocol (EAP, RFC-2284). EAP was originally designed to run over PPP and to authenticate dial-in
users, but 802.1x defines an encapsulation method for passing EAP packets over Ethernet frames. This
method is referred to as EAP over LANs, or EAPOL. Ethernet type of EAPOL is 88-8E , two octets in
length. EAPOL encapsulations are described for IEEE 802 compliant environment, such as 802.3
Ethernet, 802.11 Wireless LAN and Token Ring/FDDI.
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