Trusted Network Connect (TNC)
Summary
This feature provides Trusted Network Connect(TNC) framework that can be used to assess and verify clients' posture (or integrity measurements or configuration) and its compliance to a predefined policy with existing network access control (NAC) solutions.
Owner
Name: Avesh Agarwal
Email: avagarwa@redhat.com
Current status
Targeted release: Fedora 19
Last updated: 1/24/2013
Percentage of completion: 50%
Detailed Description
Traditionally network access control (NAC) has lacked the ability in its decision making to asses endpoint's security posture and its compliance to enterprise policies. This lack of assessment may leave an enterprise's network vulnerable to malicious attacks. Trusted Computing Group (TCG) (and IETF too) has defined an open architecture called Trusted network connect (TNC) (IETF's Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA)) to fill this gap. TNC, as part of its architectural components, includes integrity measurement collectors (IMCs) and TNC client at endpoint and integrity measurement verifiers (IMVs) and TNC server at enterprise network side communicating over NAC solutions such as EAP with 802.1X to evaluate and verify the security posture of the endpoint against the enterprise policies before allowing network access. For this, TCG has released transport (IF-T), session (IF-TNCCS) and messaging (IF-M) standards which are open and interoperable. TNC architecture by virtue of it's IF-M protocol can leverage NIST's SCAP's (OpenSCAP) automated security aspects for measurement collection, verification and remediation. In addition, TCG has defined IF-PTS and PTS protocol specifications to integrate platform trust services (PTS) with TNC for TPM based attestation of integrity measurements. PTS protocol defines messaging payloads to be used over IF-M protocol.
This feature includes the aforementioned functionalities and aims to provide an end-to-end network based client assessment, verification and remediation.