Cisco Network Admission Control

Volume I: NAC Framework Architecture and Design

A guide to endpoint compliance enforcement

Today, a variety of security challenges affect all businesses regardless of size and location. Companies face ongoing challenges with the fight against malware such as worms, viruses, and spyware. Today's mobile workforce attach numerous devices to the corporate network that are harder to control from a security policy perspective. These host devices are often lacking antivirus updates and operating system patches, thus exposing the entire network to infection. As a result, worms and viruses continue to disrupt business, causing downtime and continual patching. Noncompliant servers and desktops are far too common and are difficult to detect and contain. Locating and isolating infected computers is time consuming and resource intensive.

Network Admission Control (NAC) uses the network infrastructure to enforce security policy compliance on all devices seeking to access network computing resources, thereby limiting damage from emerging security threats. NAC allows network access only to compliant and trusted endpoint devices (PCs, servers, and PDAs, for example) and can restrict the access of and even remediate noncompliant devices.

Cisco Network Admission Control, Volume I, describes the NAC architecture and provides an in-depth technical description for each of the solution components. This book also provides design guidelines for enforcing network admission policies and describes how to handle NAC agentless hosts. As a technical primer, this book introduces you to the NAC Framework solution components and addresses the architecture behind NAC and the protocols that it follows so you can gain a complete understanding of its operation. Sample worksheets help you gather and organize requirements for designing a NAC solution.

Denise Helfrich is a technical program sales engineer that develops and supports global online labs for the World Wide Sales Force Development at Cisco®.

Lou Ronnau, CCIE® No. 1536, is a technical leader in the Applied Intelligence group of the Customer Assurance Security Practice at Cisco.

Jason Frazier is a technical leader in the Technology Systems Engineering group for Cisco.

Paul Forbes is a technical marketing engineer in the Office of the CTO, within the Security Technology Group at Cisco.

Understand how the various NAC components work together to defend your network
Learn how NAC operates and identifies the types of information the NAC solution uses to make its admission decisions
Examine how Cisco Trust Agent and NAC-enabled applications interoperate
Evaluate the process by which a policy server determines and enforces a policy
Understand how NAC works when implemented using NAC-L2-802.1X, NAC-L3-IP, and NAC-L2-IP
Prepare, plan, design, implement, operate, and optimize a network admission control solution

This security book is part of the Cisco Press® Networking Technology Series. Security titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals secure critical data and resources, prevent and mitigate network attacks, and build end-to-end self-defending networks.