Sean Convery

Well besides all the good news on the open supplicant front, it has been a while since I mentioned 802.1X adoption in general. We’re certainly seeing more interest in wired 802.1X at my company but it is seen often in the news these days as well. Here are a couple examples: first up is Intel adding hardware 802.1X support to its latest motherboards (the implications of this on virtualized OS instances could be interesting). And second, Linksys is expanding its low-end SMB line into the security arena with support for 802.1X. This adds more evidence to my contention that the core enforcement capabilities in network infrastructure are becoming commodities. I firmly believe that the future of network security will not be about more sophisticated packet inspection or manipulation techniques but rather the intelligent control of the methods we already have.

Technorati Tags: 802.1X, security, Supplicant

I’m pleased to relay the news that a development version of XSupplicant (an open source 802.1X supplicant) is now available for download. The OpenSEA alliance formed a while back and this is some of the initial results of the group (well really the talented developers of the Open1X project within OpenSEA). While this is most definitely a development release and should not be used in production, the developers are actively seeking feedback. So if you have the time and interest, they’d love any comments you may have.

Technorati Tags: 802.1X, Supplicant