Captive Portals

A captive portal is an access policy for temporary, guest, or restrictive access to a controller, service platform, or access point managed network.

Captive portals provide authenticated access using a standard Web browser. Captive portals provide authenticated access by capturing and and re-directing a wireless user's Web session to a login page where the user must enter valid credentials to access to the wireless network. Once logged into the captive portal, additional Terms and Agreement, Welcome, Fail, and No Service pages provide the administrator with options for screen flow and user appearance.

Captive portal authentication is used primarily for guest or visitor access to the network, and is increasingly used to provide authenticated access to private network resources when 802.1X EAP is not a viable option. Captive portal authentication does not provide end-user data encryption, but it can be used with static WEP, WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK encryption.

Authentication for captive portal access requests is performed using a username and password pair, authenticated by an integrated RADIUS server. Authentication for private network access is conducted either locally on the requesting wireless client, or centrally at a datacenter.

Captive portal uses a Web provisioning tool to create guest user accounts directly on the controller, service platform or access point. The connection medium defined for the Web connection is either HTTP or HTTPS. Both HTTP and HTTPS use a request and response procedure to disseminate information to and from requesting wireless clients.