Wireless - WLC authbypass feature

On the Cisco Catalyst 9800 series devices that support WLC features, there is an "authbypass" feature that can be configured.

This is a Layer 3 Web Authentication feature that allows certain users or devices to bypass the usual authentication process. This can be useful in situations where certain devices that don’t correspond to a specific user (like printers or IoT devices) cannot interact with the web-based login page to input credentials.

For authbypass, the network administrator identifies the MAC address of the device that should bypass authentication. This MAC address is then added to a whitelist on the network controller.

When this device attempts to connect to the network, the controller checks its MAC address against the whitelist. If the device’s MAC address is on the whitelist, it is allowed to bypass the usual web-based authentication process and connect directly to the network.

Note however, that this feature is not supported for wireless clients, but only for wired devices.

The authbypass feature should not be confused with the MAC Authentication Bypass (MAB) feature.