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Open source players show a knack for NAC

Universities lead the way, but wide acceptance may take awhile

By Tim Greene , Network World , 03/29/2007

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A pair of Harvard University IT staffers last week released a free virtual appliance that supports their open source network access control platform -- just one of many free NAC tools springing up to address security-hungry customers.

Called PacketFence Zero Effort NAC (ZEN), the virtual appliance consists of an operating system image that runs on Linux or Windows and performs policy checks of devices as they log on to networks.

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PacketFence ZEN is the latest innovation among about a dozen free NAC packages, most them created at colleges in reaction to the same Sasser and Blaster worms that led commercial vendors -- such as Cisco, Microsoft and the Trusted Computing Group industry consortium -- to develop NAC for profit.

NAC doesn't have to cost anything
As with many technologies, the open source community has been working on network access control (NAC) platforms that might fill the needs of organizations or provide an inexpensive way to become familiarized with the technology. Here are some of those projects:

Related Content

Name	Description
PacketFence	A platform developed independently by two Harvard University IT staffers that is promoted by Montreal integrator Inverse.
Rings	NAC software created at the University of Kansas, adopted by other universities and developed with the goal of being useful in a broad range of networks.
NetReg	Written at Carnegie Mellon University, this platform is designed with a core set of features and add-on options that can be used or not without affecting the core functionality.
FreeNAC	Created by telecom carrier Swisscom for internal use, the company is promoting it among integrators in an effort to sell it as a well-supported subscription service.
HUPnet	A project of the University of Helsinki designed for wireless network admission control but applicable to wired networks.
Ungoliant	Indianapolis University is behind this platform, which has a separate private version called Shelob that is used on campus.

Click to see: NAC doesn't have to cost anything

NAC has proven so popular that Infonetics projects commercial vendors will reap $3.9 billion in NAC sales by 2008, but the open source alternatives probably won’t share in the payday, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Open source NAC will be a catalyst that big vendors like HP or IBM will wrap around their own products and then support the heck out of it,” for a fee, he says, but that will take some time and leave out the open source innovators.

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Comments (1)

Running RINGS around NACBy Anonymous on April 5, 2007, 10:25 amWe are very happy with RINGS here at the University of Kansas, and continue to develop the application. Two developments of note are the Java-based Security Analyzer...

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