Cisco going open source with NAC client

As it develops the next-generation of network security infrastructure, Cisco Systems Inc. is planning to cease development on its network admission control (NAC) client, the Cisco Trust Agent (CTA), and submit the source code for the software client to the open-source community, Bob Gleichauf, CTO of Cisco's Security Technology Group, told InfoWorld. Cisco has a goal of making the CTA open source within "a couple months," allowing the company to free up development resources for other areas of NAC, Gleichauf said.

Cisco's decision is more evidence that Cisco will cede control of the desktop to Microsoft Corp.'s Vista, following a deal in September to use the Microsoft Network Access Protection Agent (NAP) as the client for both Cisco NAC and NAP. "CTA will be something that's open source. That's just logically where it should end up," Gleichauf told InfoWorld. "We don't want to be in the CTA business, so we're going to just open it up."

In September, Cisco and Microsoft unveiled the fruits of a long, cross company effort to integrate their network access control architectures. The plan devised by the two companies called for computers running Windows Vista or Windows Server to include the NAP Agent component as part of the core operating system, and to use that agent for both NAP and NAC. The NAP added support for Extensible Authentication Protocol over UDP and EAP-FAST support, developed by Cisco and distributed over Windows Update in addition to native EAP methods and an 802.1X supplicant to enable it to work for both NAC and NAP.