StealthWatch Introduction

Lancope was founded back in 2000 and is a leading provider of network visibility and security intelligence to protect enterprises against today's top threats. The StealthWatch System uses NetFlow, IPFIX and other types of network telemetry to detect a wide range of attacks from a variety of threats including APTs, DDoS, zero-day malware and insider threats. Lancope was just recently acquired by Cisco late last year but the company itself had a very close relationship with Cisco prior to that and thanks to that relationship, it integrates quite well with a variety of existing Cisco solutions. In this first post, I'm going to dig into some of the components of the StealthWatch System.

ISE 2.0 - Profiling

In a perfect world, you could authenticate your hosts onto the network with either dot1x or going through a guest portal but the reality is that not every device connected to your network will have the ability to navigate the guest flow or utilize dot1x. Unfortunately, most of us don't live in a perfect world and have to connect devices to our networks such as phones, IP cameras, printers, badge readers, access points, etc so for that reason, profiling comes in. What ISE will do is gather a series of attributes from the NADs that the endpoints are connected to and based on those collections of attributes, ISE is able to make a determination of what kind of device that endpoint is

ISE 2.0 - Hotspot Policy

In this post, I'm going to configure Hotspot access. Hotspot access is a little different than regular guest access in ISE. The use case for Hotspot is where you might want to allow guests to access the internet without issuing them credentials or directly identifying them but still have some level of control. An example of this is if you own a chain of retail stores and you want to give your customers guest access to the internet and you don't want them to have to self-register or disclose information about their identity. Hotspot would be the solution to provide access. With Hotspot access, you can have a branded portal for marketing reasons, have the user accept an AUP for legal reasons, redirect them to your company's page or maybe a webpage with the latest deals/coupons, and you can even have them enter an access code that you have displayed in this location to reduce random connections to the network from users not location in the establishment. 

ISE 2.0 - Guest Policy

In this post, I'm going to create my guest wireless policy. Guest access is typically what you think of when you visit a company, connect to the wireless and then get a splash page to enter some sort of credentials you were either provided or you self-register to get your own credentials. I'm going to create a basic guest wireless policy but I'll walk you through some of the different options you can use with this policy if you want to play around with this in your own lab or you're looking to deploy this in your production network.

ISE 2.0 - Understanding Policy and Configuring Dot1x

In this next post, I'm going to walk through the policy creation for dot1x for wired and wireless access. As stated in a previous post, I'm going to be using PEAP-EAP-TLS but there are many different methods you can use. I'm also going to configure differentiated access based on a user's role to demonstrate some of the possibilities with ISE.

Wireless Controller Configuration

In this post, I am going to configure my wireless controller to use ISE for AAA, set up my SSIDs, and configure other basic settings. I'm going to start from the initial installation of the Virtual Wireless Controller and go through those steps. After I have that completed, I will set up all the initial configurations you will need in order to have the Wireless Controller use ISE.

ISE 2.0 - Adding Network Access Devices

In this blog post, I'm going to add my network access devices (NADs) to my ISE deployment. These are the devices that will be sending RADIUS requests and profiling information to ISE  about endpoints on the network and, depending on the policy, ISE will be returning an authorization profile which will give the access device instructions on how to treat that endpoint. 

ISE 2.0 Initial Configuration - Enabling Services and Identity Mapping/PassiveID Configuration

In this post, we are going to enable the services for our ISE node and configure the Identity Mapping Service (known as PassiveID in ISE 2.1) between ISE and Active Directory in this blog post. The Identity Mapping service enables ISE to monitor users that are authenticated by a domain controller and not by ISE. This feature will be useful for the EasyConnect configuration that I will go over in later posts. It is able to gather this information by connecting to Active Directory using the Microsoft WMI interface and by querying logs from the Windows event messaging. 

ISE 2.0 Initial Configuration - Creating Certificate Authentication Profiles

In this next post, we are going to create the Certificate Authentication Profiles. This profile is necessary for our authentication methods that we will create in later posts. Since we will be using an EAP certificate-based authentication method in our policy, ISE will compare the certificate received from a client with the one in the server to verify the authenticity of a user or computer. This is considered a much more secure method than the traditional username and password method.