e-U/eduroam Infrastructure at the U.Porto

The University of Porto, through its Institute of Resources and Common Initiatives (IRICUP), has participated in the e-U Campus Virtual initiative, supported by the “Programa Operacional da Sociedade de Informação“ (POSI), coordinated by the “Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento” (UMIC) and developed by the “Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional” (FCCN).

This initiative included the 14 Faculties of the University along with the University of Porto Business School, Rectory and the Student Residences. The local configuration of this infrastructure, dependant of the specific conditions of each Organizational Unit, are under the responsibility of its informatics services that ensure the divulgation of the Wi-Fi services to the academic community.

The information regarding the Wi-Fi coverage maps and services offered by each Organizational Unit are available in the section Wi-Fi Networks in U.Porto.

Widening to the eduroam European Initiative

The increase of the academic population movement in Europe and its requirements in mobility terms justify the association between the e-U Wi-Fi infrastructure and theeduroam European initiative.

eduroam (Education Roaming) is one of the TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) initiatives, and its main goal is to provide a mobility service to the European academic community.

In order to integrate the e-U Virtual Campus in the eduroam European initiative an evolution of the e-U actual infrastructures is needed. Portuguese users will be able to access the wireless networks of other European Universities, and external European users will be able to use Portuguese academic infrastructures roaming seamlessly.

Migrating e-U to eduroam

The main technical difference between e-U and eduroam infrastructures is the encryption method used in the protection of user data. While both infrastructures use the authentication protocol IEEE 802.1x (EAP-TTLS and/or PEAP), eduroam uses WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) with TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) as the encryption algorithm, to increase the security access to the Wi-Fi network.

To guarantee a smooth transition between e-U and eduroam, both infrastructures will be available during a specific amount of time, during which users will make the necessary configurations according to the information provided by each Organizational Unit. After this period of time, the e-U network will be disconnected, eduroam becoming the only active SSID.

The University of Porto, along with the other national Universities, compromised to implement the e-U/eduroam infrastructure migration until the end of 2007.

Dates to keep in mind are:

• 15^th of September – Activation of the eduroam SSID
• 31^st of December – Disactivation of the e-U SSID