802.1X Supplicant - Cisco WAP121 Administration Manual

System Security
802. 1 X Supplicant

802.1X Supplicant

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Cisco Small Business WAP121 and WAP321 Wireless-N Access Point with PoE
IEEE 802. 1 X authentication enables the access point to gain access to a secured
wired network. You can enable the access point as an 802. 1 X supplicant (client) on
the wired network. A user name and password that are encrypted using the MD5
algorithm can be configured to allow the access point to authenticate using
802. 1 X.
On networks that use IEEE 802. 1 X port-based network access control, a
supplicant cannot gain access to the network until the 802. 1 X authenticator grants
access. If your network uses 802. 1 X, you must configure 802. 1 X authentication
information on the WAP device, so that it can supply it to the authenticator.
The 802. 1 X Supplicant page is divided into three areas: Supplicant Configuration,
Certificate File Status, and Certificate File Upload.
The Supplicant Configuration area enables you to configure the 802. 1 X
operational status and basic settings.
Select System Security > 802.1X Supplicant in the navigation pane.
Enter the parameters:
• Administrative Mode—Enables the 802. 1 X supplicant functionality.
• EAP Method—The algorithm to be used for encrypting authentication user
names and passwords.
- MD5—A hash function defined in RFC 3748 that provides basic security.
- PEAP—Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol, which provides a
higher level of security than MD5 by encapsulating it within a TLS tunnel.
- TLS—Transport Layer Security, as defined in RFC 5216, an open
standard that provides a high level of security.
• Username—The WAP device uses this username when responding to
requests from an 802. 1 X authenticator. The username can be 1 to 64
characters long. ASCII-printable characters are allowed, which includes
uppercase and lowercase alphabetic letters, numeric digits, and all special
characters except quotation marks.
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