Cisco Network Admission Control - Denise Helfrich

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.

Category: Cisco Press-Security

Covers: Network Admission Control

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Denise Helfrich

is currently a technical program sales engineer developing and supporting global

online labs for the Worldwide Sales Force Delivery. For the previous six years, she was a technical marketing

engineer in the Access Router group, focusing on security for Cisco Systems. She is the author of

many Cisco training courses, including Network Admission Control. She has been active in the voice/

networking industry for over 20 years.

Lou Ronnau,

CCIE No. 1536, is currently a technical leader in the Applied Intelligence group of the

Customer Assurance Security Practice at Cisco Systems. He is the author of many Cisco solution guides

along with

Implementing Network Admission Control: Phase One Configuration and Deployment.

He

has been active in the networking industry for over 20 years, the last 12 years with Cisco Systems.

Jason Frazier

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

He is a systems architect and one of the founders of Cisco's Identity-Based Networking Services

(IBNS) strategy. Jason has authored many Cisco solution guides and often participates in industry

forums such as Cisco Networkers. He has been involved with network design and security for seven

years.

Paul Forbes

is a technical marketing engineer in the Office of the CTO, within the Security Technology

Group. His primary focus is on the NAC Partner Program, optimizing the integration between vendor

applications and Cisco networking infrastructure. He is also active in other security architecture initiatives

within the Office of the CTO. He has been active in the networking industry for ten years, as both a

customer and working for Cisco.