A MAC address based authentication system applicable to campus-scale network

The authors have been developing a Web based network user authentication system “Opengate”. In the system, a user is required to type his/her password through the Web page before connecting to the Internet. Recently, types of terminal devices have been diverse, while the number of devices has been increasing. Some devices require full-time connectivity, some are not easy to type passwords smoothly, and some do not have Web functions. In this paper, the authors propose an alternate authentication system “OpengateM”, which is applicable to campus-scale networks where the users want to use various types of mobile devices. The proposed system inspects packets at the gateway, and opens the firewall when the source MAC address in the packet is found in the management database. The firewall is closed when the packet having the address is not captured for a while. User devices can be registered, expired and confirmed semi-automatically. By this implementation, the system can work even in the network having many users and devices and can maintain convenience, high device compatibility, and sufficient performance.