Appendix C: 802.1X Authentication Setup; 802.1X Authentication Infrastructure - TRENDnet TEW-303PI User Manual

APPENDIX C: 802.1x Authentication Setup

There are three essential components to the 802.1x infrastructure: (1) Supplicant, (2)
Authenticator and (3) Server. The 802.1x security supports both MD5 and TLS
Extensive 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 encryption is that there is no key management and no
limitation for the duration of key lifetime. 802.1x Authentication offers key
management, which includes key per user and key per session, and limits the lifetime
of the keys to certain duration. Thus, key decryption by unauthorized attacker
becomes extremely difficult, and the wireless network is safely secured. We will
introduce the 802.1x Authentication infrastructure as a whole and going into details of
the setup for each essential component in 802.1x authentication.

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
802.11 Wireless
Support 802.1X
Access Points
Public
802.11
Wireless
Networks
RADIUS
Server
Authentication Success
Internet/
Intranet
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