SPINACH Information

What is SPINACH ?

Spinach is an access control for public network ports and the wireless network of the William Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University. The Gates building has Ethernet ports in every office and in public spaces including lounges, conference rooms, and lobbies. Until May 1998 the ports in the public areas had not been activated, for fear that people from outside the department could walk into the building and use the departmental network for unauthorized purposes (e.g. to spam the internet).

Since Summer 1998 the Gates Building has been equipped with the Gates Building Wireless Network. Access to this network is also controlled by SPINACH.

SPINACH controls access to the Internet from the public network ports and the Gates wireless network. It is easy to use, requires no additional software and it takes only 30 seconds to get on line.
 

Who can use SPINACH?

Every member of Stanford University can currently use Spinach. To use SPINACH you need: For more information go to the User's Guide or have a look at the FAQ.
 

How does it work?

SPINACH is a mechanism that allows specifically authorized users to connect to the department network. Briefly, all the public ports belong on one "Public" subnet. The SPINACH system establishes a "prisonwall", controlling the flow of packets between hosts on the Public subnet and hosts outside the Public subnet. As users within the Public subnet authenticate themselves and thus activate network access for their hosts, SPINACH maintains an audit trail. This way, users can be held accountable for any malicious traffic they generate on the network. You can take a look at this paper for the details of a telnet-based version of SPINACH or check out the Research page.
 

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