JANET moves towards 802.1X to support international remote authentication

JANET announces the withdrawal of JRS1 Service Tier and Publication of Updated Technical Specification

20/2/09: Following the advisory issued in December, JANET(UK) announces that from 1st May 2009 the JANET Roaming eduroam service will no longer support web redirect authentication (captive portal) systems and that the JRS1 tier will be removed from the JRS Technical Specification. After this change comes into effect the 'eduroam' SSID must not be used for any WRD wireless service.

The withdrawal of the JRS1 tier follows an extended period of consultation with the community and comes into effect after having allowed a reasonable period of time for organisations still providing WRD based services to adopt the more secure 802.1x based system.

The inherent security weakness of WRD systems is widely accepted and the risk of theft of credentials via rogue access points has meant that JANET(UK) has for some time now deprecated the use of web redirect. The eduroam federation does not permit its usage across the European top-level RADIUS servers.Further to this, eduroam has also insisted that all participating NRENs disallow web redirect over their national top level RADIUS servers. JANET(UK) supports this move and the withdrawal of JRS1 enables continued use of the eduroam SSID and support of international academic remote authentication.

The JRS Technical Specification has been updated in accordance with the above change and also includes a number of improvements in response to issues encountered since the launch of the service. Version 1.1 of the Technical Specification is published on the JANET Roaming web site at: JANET Roaming Technical Specification (doc) Adobe Acrobat logo (pdf). Summarised details of the major changes can be found here: Summary of most significant changes to the JRS Technical Specification.

We appreciate the efforts that have been made by those organisations that had initially adopted WRD systems in their move to 802.1x and we look forward to the continuing successful provision and development of this service.