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41 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
41 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
What is a Captive Portal ?
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A captive portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal) is
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a web page usually employed to allow legitimate users to enter a
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network and keep intruders out. When using ntopng in inline mode
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(see README.inline for more information) you can enable the
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captive portal from the ntop preferences menu (note that you need
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to make sure you have started ntopng on HTTP port 80). At this point
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the communications between the two bridged interfaces can happen only
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for the known hosts.
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How to use the captive portal
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-----------------------------
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Once the captive portal is enabled, you need to create users for
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the captive portal. They are different from standard ntopng users
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as they are not meant to be used for accessing the ntopng GUI but
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just for authenticating on the captive portal. The idea is to create
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a portal user for a physical user, or create generic users such
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as guest or anonymous. Authenticating on the captive portal is not
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used just to enable network access, but to bind assets to people.
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Example if John owns a phone, a tablet and a laptop, when these
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devices access the network they are bound to John in addition to
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having granted network access. This way you can forget identifying
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computers and start thinking in terms of humans.
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When creating a captive portal user, ntopng will ask you to
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create a network pool that is a set of assets falling under the same
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administrative domain. They can be identified both by IP and MAC
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address. A captive portal user is bound to exactly one network pool.
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During captive portal creation, you can specify how long an asset
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can be bound to a user, either permanently or temporarily (e.g. until
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midnight). As long as an asset is bound to a user, it does not need
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to authenticate all the time it accesses the network but only
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at the first access.
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The use of the captive portal is useful for preventing unauthorized
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assets to access the network (e.g. a television or an IP phone) and
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for enforcing network access. In fact for every network pool it is
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possible to associate some network policies for blocking selected
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protocols or shaping traffic to a specific threshold.
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