Industry Standard Security and guest wifi access best practice

Yep. From 802.11-1999: 3.42 station (STA): Any device that contains an IEEE 802.11 conformant medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) interface to the wireless medium (WM).

Just so that I don't leave this discussion without any closure, I have come to a reasonable conclusion for the time being.

After being shown products which can broadcast in both open mode and wpa-psk mode without cost-prohibitive increases in architecture I have decided the best solution would be to allow an open connection to the captive portal which would then allow a guest to register for a temporary username/password and issue them the wpa psk key (keeping the key relatively secured rather than publicly posted, changeable without too much fuss, and requiring one more level of security through the login process before resources may be used).

Upon receiving the above information the guest will then switch to the secured connection used by the regular tennants. AP separation will be employed for obvious reasons. Any non wpa compliant wireless equipment will be considered deprecated and no support will be provided for it (though perhaps an exception could be made by implementing a walled garden setup on the unsecured network i.e. a non-wpa phone could be allowed to reach its sip provider at a specific ip address/port which would not be useful for someone looking to use the open network improperly and that address/port would not be published anywhere).

Thus the solution meets the conditions needed. It allows both tennants and guests access to the network that is encrypted over the air, and yet their primary point of contact is a web portal with clear, concise instructions and the phone number for a centralized help desk in case of issues.

One specific manufacturer providing the means to implement such a solution is Colubris.

Thank you all for your time and input.

Tim

Sounds good. Thanks for posting your conclusions.

On 16 Nov 2006 09:23:10 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@buildingconcepts.com wrote in :