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:
-
A laptop with a network interface. Currently
SPINACH supports:
-
10 Base-T Ethernet cards.
-
Lucent WaveLAN wireless local area network
adapter.
-
A DHCP Client (If you use Windows 95 you have
one in the operating system).
-
A Web Browser that supports SSL.
-
A SUNetID. Also known as your login and password
for your leland account.
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.
© MosquitoNet: The Operating Systems and Networking Group / webmaster@spinach.stanford.edu