(Photo Credit: Gizmodo)

You lose some. You win some: Of course as NBC’s online partner, Microsoft gets a least a cut of the $100 million dollars in online advertising spent around the Olympics. And the millions of downloads of Silverlight aren’t too shabby either.

The Internet is Falling! Arbor Networks, a security and network management company, partnered with ninety network services and content providers from around the world to publish an extensive study of IPv6 traffic on the Internet. Craig Labovitiz, Arbor Networks chief scientist, stated that only 900 days were left until the end of the Internet, or at least the exhaustion of IPv4 registry allocations. For the past year, the study shows very little IPv6 traffic – something like 1/100^th of 1% of Internet traffic. Craig credits this to money issues. “The department of commerce estimates it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6.”

Blogger James Urquhart created a bill of rights for cloud computing. The purpose of the bill is to “help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom.” The blogosphere is a great place to get some open debate going, and I applaud James for trying to make something yet so “cloudy” a bit more clear and concrete. But what’s up with the creating a PAC for this?? (Check out the comments.)

Trying to get by on limited resources? Need more money, staff and the freedom to focus on long-term projects? Sound familiar? Then you just might be in IT at a midsize company. (or in marketing at a young but rapidly growing IT company ) Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions conducted a survey of 200 tech leaders at midsize companies (500 to 3000 employees). The upside: 61% of those surveyed think they’ll be spending more on IT next year – is this bullish thinking about the economy or how much their own business (rev) will be growing?

Bill Snyder calls Dell “Bozo of the Month” for trying to trademark “cloud computing”. Yikes. Maybe not a “bozo” move but certainly inadvisable given how ubiquitous the term is. Here’s our take on it.

Boston ferries gain Wi-Fi: The MTBA has put Internet access on its 11 commuter boats that serve 4,500 daily riders. Ridership is way up this year.

Bangkok builds slow Wi-Fi network, free for first year: The details are a bit sketchy, but the government has built a 15,000-hotspot network that offer 64 Kbps connections, and will be free (with an access card) for the first year. The government is handing out 500,000 such cards at shopping malls before this week's launch.

At each of these opportunities, I like to ask ‘Why are you considering NAC?”

Here’s my Top 5 of Why Customers Consider NAC (or think they want NAC). This is not based on any other organization’s research or polls, nor is it based on analyst analysis. It’s not based on forethought or musings of an ‘expert’. It’s just my personal experience from my daily interactions.

#1: Endpoint Compliance
I put this one first, because I think it’s the most-hyped and possibly least significant. I know, that’s harsh, especially when endpoint compliance seems to be the big bat NAC carries around. Truth be told, it’s more of an ‘icing on the cake’ for the people I talk to. Until the auto-remediation features are a little more mature, the idea of checking for much beyond presence of anti-virus and possibly patches is unattractive. Frankly, endpoint compliance for LAN-based devices can be a Charlie Foxtrot except under the most ideal circumstances. There are many large organizations and DoD groups that need endpoint compliance, and that’s a primary driver for them. For the rest, one of the other reasons below is a primary compelling feature and endpoint checking is just another knob they can play with.

The lack of fervent interest in endpoint checking is why I had to disagree so strongly with Stiennon’s when he advises in his NWW article “Don’t even bother investing in NAC”. The entire premise of his issues with NAC center around various endpoing checking. (You can check out Shimel’s response  too Stiennon’s blog here.)

#2: Guest Access
Believe it or not, the most frequent response I get for “why are you considering NAC” is “guest access”. Guest access seems to be a thorn in every organization’s side. It’s a simple problem with impossibly complex solutions… or so they think. For years, we’ve been provisioning safe and secure guest access for customers with the use of clean and simple protocol-less VLANs and so, I know that about 82% of the time, there are much simpler ways to offer guest access than by rolling out a full NAC implementation. If guest access is your primary and only goal with a NAC solution, there’s probably a better, faster and less expensive solution. If money and time are no object, then NAC can be a good way to get from point A to B and give you a few fun technical trinkets to play with.

#3: Edge Port Security
After guest access, the next thing I hear most is interest in adding edge port security with a 802.1X NAC solution. (We call this Layer 2 NAC.) I tend to think for the time being, this is NAC’s sweet spot. Note I said ‘for the time being’, I think this may change in the next 18-24 months. But for now, the ability to lock down edge ports and secure switch-to-switch links is an extremely attractive feature. Outside of the 802.1X protocol, there aren’t really any other ways to skin this cat. I know what you’re thinking… you don’t have to do NAC to use 802.1X… and that’s certainly true, but for a network of any size, NAC makes an 802.1X implementation easier to manage and monitor centrally and gives you more of that NAC icing we all love.

When the 802.1X-REV comes out (probably early 2009) I think you’ll see organizations that have previously blown off 1X seriously considering it for all the added security and multi-user support it will bring to the table.

#4: User & Resource Accounting
Unless you have a 3rd party solution or want to dig through mounds of RADIUS syslogs, you probably don’t have a good way to account for user authentication and accountability of resource access throughout the network. Most vendors’ NAC solutions already have pretty good logging and reporting features built in today. Depending on the solution and integration of other devices, you may even get detailed accounts of which user viewed exactly what, when and from where. This is a great selling point to organizations that are trying to follow strict regulations for accountability of financial or extremely sensitive resources. The standards bodies (IEEE, TNC framework and IETF) are coming out with more and more ways to leverage 3rd party security devices within NAC. The IF-MAP is a great example and we’ll be seeing more I’m sure.

#5: Dynamic VLAN Assignment
Lastly, but not least, I hear a lot of customers that are looking for a good way to dynamically provision attributes, such as VLAN assignment and QoS to users or devices. It makes switch configuration and management much simpler, and eliminates the need to assign port-based VLANs. The ability to leverage your existing user directory and define both broad and very granular attributes is certainly a draw, and NAC is a great way to offer that.

That wraps up my Top 5. Of course, there are plenty more drivers, both business-based or technology-based, but these are the 5 I hear most.

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If you have no clue what 802.1X is, read my recent technology primer first. If you’re already familiar with 1X, you’ve probably heard about some of the 802.1X additions- the 802.1AE (MACSec) and possibly 802.1af (the key agreement for MACSec)… but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and what’s hiding underneath will knock your socks off!

We’re currently at the 802.1X-2004 edition, with the group working on the REV and hoping for an early-2009 release. When IEEE makes additions (such as AE and af) they’re just afterthoughts and changes tacked on to the end of the standard. But when they do a revision , as they are now, they’re opening up the whole can of worms and all parts of the standard are opened for evaluation and modification. Yee-haw!

So, what’s in this new revision and what can we expect from 802.1X-REV? That’s what I wanted to know, and I’m sure you’re curious too. I was lucky enough to catch a quick call with Paul Condon earlier this week and get some of the inside scoop. Paul is ProCurve Networking’s CTO, but more importantly for our purposes today, he’s the Vice -Chair of the IEEE 802.1 working group and is intimately involved in 1X and a variety of other networking, security and authentication standards.

1) Encryption & Key Exchange : The first goal in updating 802.1X was to add security with encryption, specifically on switch-to-switch links. Of course, with encryption comes the need for fast, secure key exchange, so we ended up with 802.1AE and 802.1af as answers to the first set of goals. The encryption will require hardware refreshes, and vendors are already gearing up for that. The benefits of encryption are pretty obvious, so I won’t bore you with that. There are some fun little gems hidden in the AE/af set though. Even without using the encryption piece, we’ll be able to use the key exchange as a means of quickly (in ~4-5 packets) authenticating (or re-authenticating) switches to one another after a reboot. It will be a critical piece for maintaining availability and integrity in the network. And w e can do this piece without a hardware upgrade, which is pretty nifty.

2) Same-Port Multiuser Support: Here’s where the 1X-REV sauce starts tasting really good. The new revision is leveraging some of its security updates to support multi-user modes on a single port. And no, not by using multi-tagged VLANs, this is way cooler than that. In theory, multiple PCs, phones or other connected devices can connect through a single port, which would essentially be running multiple instances of 802.1X, letting each communicate securely. It’ll be similar in practice to how wireless APs segregate and encrypt traffic between the AP and the endpoint. I’m sure at first we’ll see software-based endpoint encryption support and of course, move towards hardware encryption and see NICs with the capability baked in. That’s still down the road, but the road is getting shorter.

3) Network Advertisement/Selection : Now the 1X-REV sauce is the best you’ve ever had- you’re gonna want to put this stuff on everything ! :) The 3rd goal of the revision is to add support for network advertisements on the wired side- which would be a similar experience to selecting the wireless SSID from a list of ones available on your laptop. But, it’s happening on your wired switch. Wild, right? They’re going to leverage the EAPOL types here to communicate from client to network. Imagine the possibilities…

All these new functions and features give 802.1X numerous new use cases. I think you’ll see parts of these technologies leveraged in various parts of critical networks everywhere. Sponsor ballots come at the end of the year, and they’re hoping to see something solid and released in early 2009.

You can see why I’m excited. The 802.1X-REV may be the evil stepchild for a while, but it’s coming. When it does, it’s going to rock our little network worlds and flip our thinking about wired security and network segregation upside down.

Of course, you’ll be seeing more on this from me, so hang in there!

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