But Wait, There's More!
That's just the beginning. An 802.1x infrastructure opens the door to do things that were never before possible in a legacy 802.11 environment.
First and foremost, users can now be individually identified and authenticated. In a legacy WEP environment, everybody shared the same WEP key. If a user authenticated, all you really knew about that user was that she knew the WEP key. However, that information didn't tell us that the user was Stephanie from Accounting. With 802.1x, an authenticated user is uniquely identified. This means that we now have centralized AAA support (authentication, authorization, and accounting). Since we know who is connecting, we can also enforce policy-based network access. For example, time/day ...
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