A Bid For Open NAC From Juniper

Juniper Networks believes that open standards are the
key to network access control (NAC) adoption.

To that end, the networking giant today is officially rolling out its Unified
Access Control (UAC) 2.0 solution which was first previewed
in September at Interop NYC.

UAC 2.0 builds on Juniper’s UAC 1.x offering, which includes Juniper Infranet
controllers, UAC 2.0 adds on that were released last October and are
part of Juniper UAC 1.2 offering.

The release also includes new 802.1x
technologies that Juniper gained with its acquisition of Funk Software.
For example, the Odyssey Access Client (OAC) which is an
802.1x supplicant and Steel-Belted Radius (SBR) which provide authentication
functionality, are built in to this release.

The new UAC 2.0 solution also provides integration with NAC standards from
the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect (TNC) specification as
well as the IETF 802.1x port based authentication standard.

The TNC support provides a wider berth of interoperability between Juniper’s
solution and those from other TNC compliant vendors. The TNC specifications
are an industry effort to create interoperability between access control
solutions from various vendors.

Stephen Philip, director of product marketing for Juniper Networks explained
that some of the functionally that Juniper had with UAC 1 is similar to what
UAC 2 with TNC will offer particularly on the endpoint compliance piece.

“What we were using in earlier versions was something we called Juniper End Point
Defense Initiative (J.E.D.I), where we worked with a whole bunch of
partners and we developed an API  that allowed communication between
endpoints and our agents,” Philip said. “With 2.0, we’ve moved from having
that API to now having a standard interface using the TNC specification.”

By supporting TNC, UAC 2.0 is able to support more solutions from different
vendors than Juniper’s previous solution.

With the 802.1x support in UAC 2.0, Juniper is taking advantage of a
growing industry trend toward 802.1x deployment. When Juniper acquiredFunk Software, for example, it not only acquired its technology assets but also its installed base. Philip noted that Juniper has somewhere in the order of 900,000 to 1 million Funk end point clients under maintenance.

Demand for 802.1x continues to grow. In the last quarter alone, Juniper added
one customer that bought 140,000, 802.1x Funk Odyssey Access Client 802.1x
supplicants.

Philip argued that though the UAC 2.0 solution may be new, the technology
behind it is very mature. The 802.1x piece from Funk is widely deployed and
the policy engine has its roots in Juniper’s SSL-VPN technology.

“The reality is we’re not really doing it (access control) for the first
time,” Philip said.