Up until recently I was an owner of a hybrid car from one of the leading car manufacturers. The mechanical side of the car was good but I always had some serious doubts about the car’s cockpit. In particular, the touch screen mounted squarely in the middle of the dashboard, presumably to be equally accessible to the driver and the front passenger.
Tags: safety, safety and security, security
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My colleague Peter recently wrote a great blog about Thomas Edison’s predictions for 2011, which he made in 1911. While Edison didn’t predict Social Media, I thought it would be interesting to post some predictions on the subject for 2012 from an article on socialmediaexaminer.com — and the predictions’ possible influence on our blog: Read More »
Tags: 2012 predictions, Cisco, Manufacturing, social media, social selling
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I spent a recent weekend helping a friend load his belongings into a moving van, in preparation for relocating his family from California to Texas. Sometime between lifting my end of a sofa and carrying boxes that apparently contained his collection of concrete blocks, we talked about his search for a new home.
Although there are certain amenities he would like his new house to have, the biggest influence on his choice of residence is the old real estate axiom location, location, location. He has a child in preschool and a good job, so you can guess his priorities: something near a highly rated school, not too far from work and where property values are apt to rise over time.
Location is a critical consideration for Data Centers, too, although for different reasons. Read More »
Tags: air economizer, carbon footprint, Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, electrical mix, energy efficiency, natural disasters, power costs, site selection
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
While the European and United States economies struggle with mounting debt, there’s an encouraging success story south of the equator; one that combines infrastructure improvement, broadband deployment, and thriving commerce.
According to the findings in a white paper entitled Latin American Economic Outlook 2012 — jointly produced by the Economic Commission for Latin America and The Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) — between 2000 and 2007, public debt in Latin America
Tags: broadband, economic development, global networked economy, latin america
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Not too long ago I was assigned to a troubleshooting and remediation project for a hospital here in the SF bay area. The problem, after much troubleshooting and lab recreations, was determined to be due to an unique issue with client roaming and authentication. During the course of troubleshooting my coworker and myself often found ourselves explaining 802.1X and 802.11i to others working on the troubleshooting effort, or requesting technical updates. So based on that experience, I started thinking this might a be a good topic to cover here.
Let’s review the some of typical components of the enterprise wireless security model.
What is 802.1X?
802.1X is not a protocol, but rather a framework for a “port-based” access control method. 802.1X was initially created for use in switches, hence the port-based terminology, which really doesn’t fit too well in wireless since users don’t connect to a port. In the end it’s meant to be a logical concept in the 802.11 world. 802.1X was adopted for wireless networks with the creation of 802.11i to provide authenticated access to wireless networks. At a high level. the framework allows for a client that has connected to the WLAN to remain in a blocked port status until it has been authenticated by a AAA server. Essentially the only traffic allow through this virtual blocked port is EAP traffic, things like HTTP would be dropped.
What is EAP?
EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) is the authentication method used by 802.1X. It can take on various forms, such as PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-FAST, to name a few. There is one thing to remember when determining what EAP type to use in your network, is that it is dependent upon what your client and AAA server supports. This is it, your AP or AP/Controller hardware or code version will play no part in version is supported. Unless your AP/controller is acting as the AAA server, but I’ll stay away from that in this post. I think this can be a point of confusion for people who haven’t read much or anything about EAP methods. So, if some one asks what version of EAP the AP will support, all you need to do is ask them, what does their Client and AAA server support.
What is 802.11i?
Simply put, 802.11i is an amendment to the original 802.11 standard to address the well documented security short comings of WEP. It incorporates WPA as a part of the 802.11i amendment and adds the fully approved WPA2 with AES encryption method. 802.11i introduces the concept of a Robust Security Network (RSN) with the Four-way handshake and the Group key Handshake.
Tags: 802.11, 802.11i, 802.1x, AAA server, access point, access points, EAP, EAP-FAST, EAP-TLS, engineer, engineers, PEAP, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless controller, wireless LAN, wlan, WLC
