CANSAS Overview

CANSAS is a research and development project whose aim is to create a Hotspot based in a CD-Live Linux box in order to serve certain network resources (Internet, mail servers, printers, etc) to any user independently from their connection place.

The main goal of this software is to develop the tools and integrate the existent open source tools used to control the way users log into these services, the rules to grant access to these services based in the user's identification and the eventual billing to these users

Nowadays the solutions available to manage network users are foucused only in certain administrator necessities due to the partial point of view about the general network organization that doesn't mind about mobile users accessing the network from different devices and network places.

This new model makes useless some of these tools and forces administrator to develop their own applications which are often unable to integrate with the existent ones.

The project is being developed having in mind the following issues:

• Communications security: this kind of systems should assure the communications, because the traffic goes through an unsecure medium.
• Performance: the system must provide an accurate performance in order to support several users and make use of scalability to reack this target.
• Cost: the system must have minimal standard hardware requirements.
• Universal authentication: the global authentication model provide the possibility to authenticate to any authority in wich the system has the enough confidence (LDAP, RADIUS, shadow passwords, etc).
• Minimal client configuration: the system should provide access without special software requirements and independently from the client hardware.
• Logs: any authentication attempt must be logged as well as source and destination IPs and other usefull information about stablished communications.

-- AndresGomezGarcia - 17 Mar 2005

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