EXCAP with sms authentication

[Daniel_]

Hi, I have couple question regaring sms authentication with custom captive portal. I only want to simple portal, where guest users enters their phone number.

Is it possible to setup custom captive portal with basic sms authentication? I don't want to use Twilio.

Which information will be in meraki dashboard? With twilio account, I can see phone number+device+ap assigment etc.

Is there a backwards communication between external captive portal and dashboard? for example, timeout after 10 minutes and forcing guest user to enter new sms token.

thanks

Daniel

[jdsilva]

Yeh I'm sure there's a way to get this done, but you're going to have to handle all of the SMS stuff yourself somehow. Meraki doesn't have any tools to help you, all they offer is Twilio. 

The ExCap config guide has some good info on what info goes back and forth, and what you need to send. It doesn't have any info on doing your own SMS ExCap specifically, but I would think it would have useful info to help you get it done.

https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_whitepaper_captive_portal.pdf

[Fady]

Hi Daniel

You can run SMS Authentication through RADIUS, so you will use RADIUS as translator between your SMS Gateway and your Meraki wireless solution so when user wants to authenticate, they will get challenged by External Captive Portal that uses RADIUS and this RADIUS server will need to integrate with your SMS Gateway in order to be able to validate the user identity then allow/deny access. 

So RADIUS is required here to be used at the back of you External Captive portal. 

[Daniel_]

Hi Fady, thank you for reply, but Is it radius necessary? I'm thinking about feature email-to-sms. but I'm not sure if it's supported with this captive portals.

[Fady · Accepted solution]

Hi @Daniel_

You will need to use the attributes to allow/deny access of the user after verifying their phone number, you don''t have to have RADIUS server built for that if you want to code it yourself and use these attributes which can get a bit complicated.

Check this document, around page 12 to get more information

https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_whitepaper_captive_portal.pdf

[Daniel_]

thanks, I understand.