Managing guest access

Visitors to your premises might need user accounts on your network for the duration of their stay. If you are hosting a large event such as a conference, you might need to create many such temporary accounts. The FortiOS Guest Management feature is designed for this purpose.

A guest user account User ID can be the user’s email address, a randomly generated string, or an ID that the administrator assigns. Similarly, the password can be administrator-assigned or randomly generated.

You can create many guest accounts at once using randomly-generated User IDs and passwords. This reduces administrator workload for large events.

User’s view of guest access

1. The user receives an email, SMS message, or printout from a FortiOS administrator listing a User ID and password.
2. The user logs onto the network with the provided credentials.
3. After the expiry time, the credentials are no longer valid.

Administrator’s view of guest access

1. Create one or more guest user groups.

All members of the group have the same characteristics: type of User ID, type of password, information fields used, type and time of expiry.

2. Create guest accounts using Guest Management.
3. Use captive portal authentication and select the appropriate guest group.

Configuring guest user access

To set up guest user access, you need to create at least one guest user group and add guest user accounts. Optionally, you can create a guest management administrator whose only function is the creation of guest accounts in specific guest user groups. Otherwise, any administrator can do guest management.

Creating guest management administrators

To create a guest management administrator

1. Go to System > Administrators and create a regular administrator account. For detailed information see the System Administration
2. Select Restrict to Provision Guest Accounts.
3. In Guest Groups, add the guest groups that this administrator manages.

Creating guest user groups

The guest group configuration determines the fields that are provided when you create a guest user account.

Configuring guest user access

To create a guest user group:

1. Go to User & Device > User Groups and select Create New.
2. Enter the following information:

Creating guest user accounts

Guest user accounts are not the same as local user accounts created in User & Device > User Definition. Guest accounts are not permanent; they expire after a defined time period. You create guest accounts in User & Device > Guest Management.

To create a guest user account

1. Go to User & Device > Guest Management.
2. In Guest Groups, select the guest group to manage.
3. Select Create New and fill in the fields in the New User

Fields marked Optional can be left blank. The guest group configuration determines the fields that are available.

4. Select OK.

To create multiple guest user accounts automatically

1. Go to User & Device > Guest Management.
2. In Guest Groups, select the guest group to manage.

The guest group must have the Enable Batch Guest Account Creation option enabled.

3. Select Create New > Multiple Users.

Use the down-pointing caret to the right of Create New.

4. Enter Number of Accounts.
5. Optionally, change the Expiration.
6. Select OK.

Guest management account List

Go to User & Device > Guest Management to create, view, edit or delete guest user accounts.

Guest access in a retail environment

Guest access in a retail environment

Some retail businesses such as coffee shops provide free WiFi Internet access for their customers. For this type of application, the FortiOS guest management feature is not required; the WiFi access point is open and customers do not need logon credentials. However, the business might want to contact its customers later with promotional offers to encourage further patronage. Using an Email Collection portal, it is possible to collect customer email addresses for this purpose. The security policy grants network access only to users who provide a valid email address.

The first time a customer’s device attempts to use the WiFi connection, FortiOS requests an email address, which it validates. The customer’s subsequent connections go directly to the Internet without interruption.

Creating an email harvesting portal

The customer’s first contact with your network will be with a captive portal which presents a web page requesting an email address. When FortiOS has validated the email address, the customer’s device MAC address is added to the Collected Emails device group.

To create the email collection portal:

1. Go to WiFi & Switch Controller > SSID and edit your SSID.
2. Set Security Mode to Captive Portal.
3. Set Portal Type to Email Collection.
4. Optionally, in Customize Portal Messages select Email Collection.

You can change the portal content and appearance. See Customizing captive portal pages on page 105.

To create the email collection portal – CLI:

In this example the freewifi WiFi interface is modified to present an email collection captive portal.

config wireless-controller vap edit freewifi set security captive-portal set portal-type email-collect

end

Creating the security policy

You need configure a security policy that allows traffic to flow from the WiFi SSID to the Internet interface but only for members of the Collected Emails device group. This policy must be listed first. Unknown devices are not members of the Collected Emails device group, so they do not match the policy.

To create the security policy:

1. Go to Policy & Objects > IPv4 Policy and select Create New.
2. Enter the following information:

3. Select OK.

To create the authentication rule – CLI:

config firewall policy edit 3 set srcintf “freewifi” set dstintf “wan1” set srcaddr “all” set action accept set devices collected-emails

set nat enable set schedule “always” set service “ALL”

end

Checking for harvested emails

In the web-based manager, go to User & Device > Device Inventory. In the CLI you can use the diagnose user device list command. For example,

FGT-100D # diagnose user device list hosts vd 0 d8:d1:cb:ab:61:0f gen 35 req 30 redir 1 last 43634s 7-11_2-int ip 10.0.2.101 ip6 fe80::dad1:cbff:feab:610f type 2 ‘iPhone’ src http c 1 gen 29 os ‘iPhone’ version ‘iOS 6.0.1’ src http id 358 c 1

email ‘yo@yourdomain.com’

vd 0 74:e1:b6:dd:69:f9 gen 36 req 20 redir 0 last 39369s 7-11_2-int ip 10.0.2.100 ip6 fe80::76e1:b6ff:fedd:69f9 type 1 ‘iPad’ src http c 1 gen 5 os ‘iPad’ version ‘iOS 6.0’ src http id 293 c 1

host ‘Joes’s-iPad’ src dhcp email ‘you@fortinet.com’

Fall-through authentication policies

User authentication policies have an implicit fall-through feature that intentionally causes policy matching to fall through to a policy lower on the list that can also match the traffic. In other words the first user policy that is matched in the policy list, based on standard policy criteria, isn’t the only policy that can be matched.

Fall-through is intended to match users in different user groups with different policies. For example, consider an organization with two user groups where one group requires a web filtering profile, while the other requires virus scanning. In this example, you would edit two basic Internet access policies: policy 1 assigning User Group A with a Web Filtering profile, and policy 2 assigning User Group B with an AntiVirus profile. Both policies are also assigned to the same internal subnet, named subnet1.

In this configuration, all users from subnet1 will see an authentication prompt. If the user is found in User Group A, the traffic is accepted by policy 1 and is filtered by the Web Filtering profile. If the user is found in User Group B, the traffic is accepted by policy 2 and is virus scanned.

The fall-through feature is required for users to be matched with policy 2. Without the fall-through feature, traffic would never be matched with policy 2.