JANET(UK) is participating in a project to develop and test the open sourced 802.1x OpenSEA Supplicant, to facilitate use of the JANET Roaming Service www.ja.net/roaming
The JANET Roaming Service (JRS) allows users from participating organisations to move between JANET connected organisations and gain network connectivity at sites with a single username and password.
At present, the JRS permits two types of network access technology: the simple to use, yet inherently insecure, web redirect; and IEEE 802.1x, widely acknowledged as the current best practice secure solution but requiring a software ‘supplicant’ to run on all connected nodes. IEEE 802.1x has recently been mandated by eduroam as the only technology that should be used by members of the eduroam federation.
Experience within the educational sector suggests that the IEEE 802.1x client (or “supplicant”) supplied by Microsoft with Windows XP and Vista has some significant limitations which are impeding adoption of IEEE 802.1x within the community both in the context of the JRS and network admission applications in general. This is the so-called ‘supplicant problem’.
To address this problem, JANET(UK) has joined the OpenSEA Alliance as a contributory board member (See press release). The Alliance are developing an open source 802.1x supplicant.
To ensure the software meets the requirements of organisations within the education sector, JANET(UK) has issued a call for participation to the JANET community. Organisations are invited to participate in testing, fault reporting and bug fixing and producing documentation.
The closing date for the call was 20th July 2007. To be kept up to date with this project, please subscribe to the project mailing list.
For more information about this project, please contact Louis Searchwell, Technical Specialist: Authentication & Authorisation.
