Captive Portal Interaction (capport)

Name

Captive Portal Interaction

Acronym

capport

Area

Applications and Real-Time Area (art)

State

Active

Charter

charter-ietf-capport-01 Approved

Dependencies

Document dependency graph (SVG)

Additional Resources

- GitHub

Personnel

Chairs

Erik Kline
Martin Thomson

Area Director

Barry Leiba

Mailing list

Address

captive-portals@ietf.org

To subscribe

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/captive-portals

Charter for Working Group

Some networks require interaction from users prior to authorizing
network access. Before that authorization is granted, network access
might be limited in some fashion. Frequently, this authorization process
requires human interaction to arrange for payment or to accept some
legal terms.

Currently, network providers use a number of interception techniques to
reach a human user (such as intercepting cleartext HTTP to force a
redirect to a web page of their choice), and these interceptions are
indistinguishable from man-in-the-middle attacks. As endpoints become
inherently more secure, existing interception techniques will become
less effective or will fail entirely. This will result in a poor user
experience as well as a lower rate of success for the Captive Portal
operator.

The CAPPORT Working Group will define secure mechanisms and protocols to
- allow endpoints to discover that they are in this sort of limited
environment,
- provide a URL to interact with the Captive Portal,
- allow endpoints to learn about the parameters of their confinement,
- interact with the Captive Portal to obtain information such as status
and remaining access time, and
- optionally, advertise a service whereby devices can enable or disable
access to the Internet without human interaction.
(RFC 7710 may be a full or partial solution to the first two bullets)

The working group may produce working documents to define taxonomy and
to survey existing portals and solutions. These might or might not be
published as RFCs, and might or might not be combined in some way.

Out of scope are "roaming" (federation of credentials), network
selection, or the on-boarding/provisioning of clients onto secure (or
any alternate) networks. These are not really captive portals, and have
largely been solved in other ways.

Initially, the working group will focus on simplifying captive portal
interactions where a user is present. A secondary goal is to look at the
problem posed to or by devices that have little or no recourse to human
interaction.

Milestones

Date	Milestone
1 Jul 2019	API for Captive Portal Interaction
1 Jul 2019	API for Captive Portal Interaction
1 Jul 2019	Protocol to discover and interact with a Captive Portal