802.1x machine vs user authentication

Question

In the process of depolying 802.1x on wired LAN. What is the difference between machine authentication and user authentication? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

OK, so assuming we're still talking the MSFT supplicant, you have some options:
1) USe EAP-TLS and mark any certs deployed to your corporate-owned assets and non-exportable. This solves the issue by brute force. You don't exactly need machine-authentication to do this. You may need machine-auth for other reasons (as I believe we've discussed here).
2) If PEAP is in use, use the machine-auth and the Machine-Access-Restriction feature in ACS. What this does is a coupling of the notions of machine-auth as a preceeding policy decision for user-auth. Example: It is technically possible that anyone with a valid NT account may be able to 802.1x-authenticate from "any" machine. But with the machine-access-restriction feature, they will only be able to do so if ACS has also authenticated a valid machine-auth session prior to the login attempt.
3) Use a NAR in ACS. A NAR is a Network Access Restriction. If for example, you have a database of all the MAC Addresses you have (or an OID wildcard) you can configure further checking of a MAC address from an otherwise valid 802.1x authentication attempt. This effectively tells ACS to only allow authentication attempts from MAC Addresses it knows about.
Hope this helps.