iOS 7 and captive portal – a guide to captive portal requirements
By Sebastiano Bertani - October 3rd, 2013.
The release of iOS 7 created a lot of issues to captive portal technology providers, splash pages desgners and hotspots in general.
Apple changed completely the way any iPhone performs the test to see if the device is connected behind a Captive Portal, so most implementations stopped working.
Here in Tanaza we collected all the devices that we had in our lab, as well as in the neighbours startups, and decided to spend one entire day to perform tests. We now are happy to share what we discovered in this knowledge base article, summarized in the following.
Captive Portal automatic detection, avoid login popups
Scenario
When “Captive Portal” functionalities (alias “External Splash Page” in the Tanaza configuration) are enabled on an SSID , the access point filters all the requests sent by a client and allows/ denies the user access to internet based on a policy defined on the splash page.
In this scenario what happens is that when a user connects to that specific SSID, no matter what site he is asking for, the user will be redirected to the splash page defined in the tanaza configuration.
Since the users is not aware that he is not allowed access to internet, unless he opens a browser and tries to surf, all the Operative Systems (desktop and mobile ones) have developed a strategy through which they find out if they are behind a captive portal.
In case when they detect a captive portal a popup like brower is started asking the user to login to the captive portal.
Problem
These popup like brower can have some limitations (cookies not enabled, javascript disabled, anonimous session) and usually do not allow the user to experience a splash page correctly.
The best thing to do is to avoid these limited browsers to pop up, forcing the user to use a simple browser to access the splash page.
Another problem is that every Operative System (Windows, Macintosh, Android, iOs, …) has a different way of detecting the captive portal, making it difficult to disallow these limited browsers.
Solution
To solve this issues Tanaza offers an easy way to configure a Captive Portal, allowing to skip “Captive Portal automatic detection” for all kinds of Operative Systems. Therefore, allowing the customer to be sure that the user accesses the splash page with a fully featured browser, to allow cookie storing and javascript functionalities.
In the configuration section for SSID, next to the social login sets, you can find this button...