NAC is a system that's designed to control access and ensure compliance. It uses a set of processes and technologies that are focused on controlling who and what is able to access a network and its resources. NAC does this by authorizing devices that have a level of compliance to operate on a corporate network.
Once a device is connected, the NAC server is able to profile and check whether the connected device has met the standard of compliance before allowing access to the network resources, security policies, and controls, which are configured to ensure that there is some form of restriction that prevents non-compliant devices from obtaining network access.
IEEE 802.1x is the NAC standard for both LAN (wired) and WLAN (wireless) networks. Within an 802.1x network, there are three main components:
- Authentication server: The authentication server is the device...