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Supplicants Page

Overview

An 802.1x supplicant is simply a piece of software you install on your computer to allow you to use certain kinds wireless networks. From Wikipedia:

'A Wireless Supplicant is a program that runs on a computer and is responsible for making login requests to a wireless network. It handles passing the login and encryption credentials to the authentication server. It also handles roaming from one wireless access point to another, in order to maintain connectivity.'

ANU-Secure and EduRoam may require that you install a supplicant on your machine, depending upon what operating system you have. Typically Windows and Linux will require a supplicant and Mac will not.

Refer to the OS Support page for information about when to use a supplicant.

Why Is An 802.1x Supplicant Required?

Ideally support for all of the various 802.1x authentication methods and protocols would be built in to the operating system. In the case of the Apple Mac and iPhone this is true, and the user does not need to be bothered with exactly what 802.1x methods are being employed.

Unfortunately Microsoft has chosen to not offer broad support for 802.1x in it's Windows operating systems. In fact Windows supports only one (PEAPv0/MSCHAP) of the possible options. This option happens to be fully supported by other MS products such as Active Directory. The ANU wireless and authentication infrastructure does NOT support this method, primarily because we use LDAP, not Active Directory, for directory services.

The impact of this MS policy is that anyone NOT using the Windows-supported 802.1x method needs to install some special software to handle 802.1x authentication on behalf of Windows.

SecureW2

SecureW2 is the Windows 802.1x supplicant recommended for ANU-Secure and EduRoam and supported by DOI.

Windows users no longer need to install and configure the supplicant separately. Please visit the link below for intructions on how to download and install the new pre-packaged ANU-Secure installer:

Connecting to ANU-Secure