First off, the 802.1X standard is a framework for port-based network access control using authentication. As pulled from the 802.1X-2010 standard document:
“Port-based network access control allows a network administrator to restrict the use of IEEE 802 LAN service access points (ports) to secure communication between authenticated and authorized devices. IEEE Std 802.1X specifies an architecture, functional elements, and protocols that support mutual authentication between the clients of ports attached to the same LAN and secure communication between the ports.”
802.1X port-based authentication allows the network team to control network access based on user or machine identity. The access control be permitting all traffic, denying all traffic, or only allowing certain access based off of access control lists (ACLs) or Virtual LAN (VLAN) assignment. With the use of certain software or appliances, the power and visibility you have over your network can become quite impressive. On the other hand, you have to know what you’re doing and how to do it, or you could end up denying access to every user on your network. There are many methods of deployment and different aspects that can be tuned and tweaked in order to operate most efficiently given your scenario.
To begin, let’s go over the basic operation of 802.1X.