Now one university is using NAC to control student use of gaming devices, not out of a concern about security, but to make registering the devices simpler.

Wright State University estimates it has hundreds of gaming devices, and in order for them to get on the netowork - something the school is OK with - they needed students to register them so they could be white listed from their Mirage Networks NAC appliance.

The school had been forcing students to come in and register the MAC addresses of their games, and that was time consuming for the IT department and the students, says Larry Fox, the director of networks for the school.

Either that or they had to plug the consoles into their laptops and plug their laptops into the network, but that was challenging. "It was a pain for them if they didn't know what to do," Fox says.

With online registration of the devices, the school has made it simpler for students to plug their games in, but with software written for it by Mirage, it can better track that the white listed devices aren't being spoofed by other machines, Fox says.

The Mirage NAC gear detects traffic specific to PlayStation, Tivo, Xbox and Wii gear. If a device admitted to the network as a gaming console starts spewing traffic other than what is specific to a PlayStation, Tivo, Xbox or Wii, it can be shut off, Fox says.

The NAC gear was bought primarily to make sure laptops have patched operating systems as well as antivirus and antispam software, but it has found other uses.

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