was 802.1x a wifi standard?

What I mean is, the other Wifi security standard, 802.11i is in the .11 family with the standards a,b,g,n. But WPA is .1x... I'm not asking the indepth history, but was it an official standard, and if so why isnt it in the family. My best guess is that it was an interim standard and not officially adopted to 11. If that is the case, what is the .1 standard?

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Comments

Ivanjam

The IEEE 802.1 Working Group is different from the 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group. The .11 in 802.11 is not "dot-one-one" implying a subgroup of the .1 "dot-one" group but actually "dot-eleven". To answer your question, 802.1X is a port-based network Access Control mechanism for both LAN's and WLAN's, not just for wireless.

TurK-FX

802.1D= Spanning Tree
802.1Q=Trunking
802.1=General network recommendation

docrice

802.1X originally had nothing to do with 802.11 and was geared for wired networks, not wireless. It's a completely different IEEE working group.

The idea of the port-based access control framework was eventually incorporated into 802.11i as a security enhancement. At first it's confusing until you realize that they only share an outward similarity in how you look at the nomenclature (both begin with "802.").

Even the term "port-based" is confusing until you realize that in 802.1X they're looking at it from an electrician's point of view (where an "open port" is referring to a broken circuit, thus data isn't really flowing through it yet, and in 802.1X terminology this means only authentication is being passed and not allowing user data until authentication has been validated with a green light).

SephStorm

So WPA can be used on LAN's as well?

Nah, the only confusing part is that the ICND cirriculim only mentions 1x in association with wireless, so it is easy to assume that 1X was a response to WEP, and related to 11i and therefore should be a member of the 11 family, but I totally get it.

docrice

WPA is specific to 802.11 and leverages the framework/process of 802.1X. Given the security issues with the wireless medium which is accessible to anyone with a spectrum analyzer or other radio which can receive 802.11 signals, WPA helps mitigates some of the risk by defining the process of exchanging certain keys and other bits over the air to increase confidentiality.

802.1X, however, can be used on LANs. You can configure Cisco switches to do this. So in a way it's similar to how WPA helps protect 802.11 networks, it doesn't have WPA functions (like the 4-way handshake and so on).

theodoxa

SephStorm wrote: »

So WPA can be used on LAN's as well?

Nah, the only confusing part is that the ICND cirriculim only mentions 1x in association with wireless, so it is easy to assume that 1X was a response to WEP, and related to 11i and therefore should be a member of the 11 family, but I totally get it.

WPA and 802.1x are different but related things. WPA can use either a Preshared Key (WPA-PSK) or 802.1x (WPA-Enterprise) for authentication. In my MCITP classes we used 802.1x with a RADIUS Server to authenticate VPN (Remote Users and Demand-Dial/Site-to-Site) connections.