Network specification
Eduroam system enables the acces to the wireless and ethernet network without the necessity of contacting with local administrators. The institutions taking part in this project oblige to keep the common privacy politics and to trust the information sent from other instittions joined in the system.
Eduroam allows users of participating institutions to access the Internet at other participants' locations using their own password and username. The settings that the user uses allow to get the access to eduroam network in any other place. It doesn't mean that the access to the network is anonymous and uncontrolled. Every connevction to the network is noted down and eventual abuse can be later related to specific person.
Details
The connection to the eduroam network requires user authentication according to the 802.1x standard. This type of authentication can be switched on as well for standard connections (ethernet) as wireless. At present that second type is more common.
The 802.1x standard allows for preliminary check, if the user has the right to connect the network. Authentication can be put into practice in many ways, however the choice of the method depends on the mother institution, not the one that the user wants to connect to. Despite the authentication, the encoding of the transmission is being compleeted by unique session key. This key is frequently changed during the session. On the basis of the authorisation data the user can be qualified to a suitable security group and give him proper rights. Thanks to this kind of attitude the user in his mother institution has more rights than the guests, despite the fact that the configuration settings stay the same.
Eduroam in practice
The most common case is a notebook equiped with MS Windows XP and sufficiently modern network wireless card. The used has configured connection to the eduroam network. The configuration of the network has enabled 802.1x protocol service and defined method of authetication, usually the authentication data is saved on the computer. In this situation, the network should be available after turning on the computer. There is no need to configure anything. If the notebook finds available any other wireless networks, the user has to choose the eduroam network from the list. However, if the eduroam network is set as deafult, the user doesn't have to do it.
The text is taken from the website eduroam.pl
