A captive portal is an access policy for providing guests temporary and restrictive access to the controller or service platform managed network.
A captive portal policy provides secure authenticated controller or service platform access using a standard Web browser. Captive portals provides authenticated access by capturing and re-directing a wireless user's Web browser session to a captive portal login page where the user must enter valid credentials to access to the network. Once logged into the captive portal, additional Terms and Agreement, Welcome, Fail and No Service pages provide the administrator with a number of options on captive portal screen flow and user appearance.
Captive portal authentication is used primarily for guest or visitor access, but 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 or service platform. The connection medium defined for the Web connection is either HTTP or HTTPS. Both HTTP and HTTPS use a request and response procedure clients follow to disseminate information to and from requesting wireless clients.
Refer to the following sections for configuring Captive Portal Policy parameters: