The Horatio system is a firewall authentication
tool. The premise: legitimate users want to attach
laptops and other mobile hosts to the network, but
security demands that illegitimate users be
prevented from accessing the internal, secure
network and from abusing the general Internet. The
approach taken by Horatio is to provide a
separate, untrusted network that only connects to
the internal network (and thus to the Internet)
through a firewall that by default does not pass
any traffic. When a legitimate user connects his
or her host, it is assigned an address by a DHCP
server (such as dhcpd), but is unable to contact
anything outside the untrusted network. The user
must point a Web browser at the Horatio web
server, which runs on the firewall machine, and
provide a username and password. Once the username
and password have been validated, the firewall
rules are modified to allow the host access to the
rest of the network.
