Appendix C: 802.1X Authentication Setup; 802.1X Authentication Infrastructure - LevelOne WAP-0003 User Manual

APPENDIX C: 802.1x Authentication Setup

There are three essential components to the 802.1x infrastructure: (1) Supplicant, (2)
Authe nticator and (3) Server.
Authentication Protocol (EAP). The 802.1x Authentication is a complement to the current WEP
encryption used in wireless network. The current security weakness of WEP encryp tion is that
there is no key management and no limitation for the duration of key lifetime.
Authentication offers key management, which includes key per user and key per session, and
limits the lifetime of the keys to certain duration.
attacker becomes extremely difficult, and the wireless network is safely secured.
introduce the 802.1x Authentication infrastructure as a whole and going into details of the setup
for each essential component in 802.1x au thentication.

802.1x Authentication Infrastructure

Authentication Request
802.11 Wireless
Support 802.1X
Clients
The Infrastructure diagram showing above illustrates that a group of 802.11 wireless clients is
trying to form a 802.11 wireless network with the Access Point in order to have access to the
Internet/Intranet. In 802.1x authentication infrastructure, each of these wireless clients would
have to be authenticated by the Radius server, which would grant the authorized client and
notified the Access Point to open up a communication port to be used for the granted client.
There are 2 Extensive Authentication Protocol (EAP) methods supported: (1) MD5 and (2) TLS.
The 802.1x security supports both MD5 and TLS Extensive
802.11 Wireless
Support 802.1X
Access Points
Public
802.11
Wireless
Networks
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Thus, key decryption by unauthorized
RADIUS
Server
Authentication Success
Internet/
Intranet
802.1x
We will