PhoneDifferent
Today, March 10, 2008, 7 hours ago
http://phonedifferent.com/2008/03/8021x_biz_edu.html
iPhone 802.1x a Win for Business and Universities
Today, March 10, 2008, 7 hours ago | Rene Ritchie

When the iPhone and iPod Touch first shipped, many eager big business
users and university students snapped up the "breakthrough internet
devices" only to find that, because the iPhone and iPod Touch didn't
support the 802.1x protocol, they couldn't connect to some very large
Wi-Fi networks. Posts piled up on Apple's Discussion Boards, feature
requests and bug reports flooded in (I know I sent one!), and, as of
the SDK Roadmap event on Thursday, Apple has listened! 802.1x has been
announced for firmware 2.0! But what is it and why's is it so
important? Let's say you bring home a Wi-Fi router and plug it in,
then find out that, because you didn't put any type of security
password on it, your neighbor has been stealing your bandwidth. So you
try WEP (wire equivalent privacy), but since it was designed by
engineers and not cryptographers, your rascally neighbor can just
download a little utility from the web, crack your security in under a
minute, and start torrent'ing away again on your dime. Finally, you
switch to robust WPA(2) (Wi-Fi protected access) along with a monster
64 character Gibson-certified pseudo-random password and, d'oh, your
neighbors locked out and the cheapskate has to pony up for his own
broadband. Now let's say instead of your home, you're running a
business or academic institution with thousands or tens of thousands
of users. You can't just slap on a password (even a secure one),
because you'd have to give it to each of those users, who could then
just tell their friends, and there goes security. Worse, from an
administrative perspective, anytime someone left your business or
institution, you'd have to change the password and get the new one to
tens of thousands of users. Nightmare. That's where 802.1x comes in.
Rather than the router using a single ID with a single, common
password, 802.1x allows for an authentication server to be running,
and thus enables more powerful, flexible, and manageable Wi-Fi for
very large networks. With 802.1x any one of tens of thousands of users
can connect to the authentication server, pass along a set of
credentials, and be allowed onto the network (or rejected if the
credentials fail). And with late June's 2.0 firmware update, tens of
thousands of users will be doing just that, at long last, on the
iPhone and iPod Touch.