Cisco ISE Users
In this chapter, the term user refers to employees and contractors who access the network regularly as well as sponsor and guest users. A sponsor user is an employee or contractor of the organization who creates and manages guest-user accounts through the sponsor portal. A guest user is an external visitor who needs access to the organization’s network resources for a limited period of time.
You must create an account for any user to gain access to resources and services on the Cisco ISE network. Employees, contractors, and sponsor users are created from the Admin portal.
User Identity
User identity is like a container that holds information about a user and forms their network access credentials. Each user’s identity is defined by data and includes: a username, e-mail address, password, account description, associated administrative group, user group, and role.
User Groups
User groups are a collection of individual users who share a common set of privileges that allow them to access a specific set of Cisco ISE services and functions.
User Identity Groups
A user’s group identity is composed of elements that identify and describe a specific group of users that belong to the same group. A group name is a description of the functional role that the members of this group have. A group is a listing of the users that belong to this group.
Default User Identity Groups
Cisco ISE comes with the following predefined user identity groups:
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Employee—Employees of your organization belong to this group.
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SponsorAllAccount—Sponsor users who can suspend or reinstate all guest accounts in the Cisco ISE network.
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SponsorGroupAccounts—Sponsor users who can suspend guest accounts created by sponsor users from the same sponsor user group.
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SponsorOwnAccounts—Sponsor users who can only suspend the guest accounts that they have created.
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Guest—A visitor who needs temporary access to resources in the network.
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ActivatedGuest—A guest user whose account is enabled and active.
User Role
A user role is a set of permissions that determine what tasks a user can perform and what services they can access on the Cisco ISE network. A user role is associated with a user group. For example, a network access user.
User Account Custom Attributes
Cisco ISE allows you to restrict network access based on user attributes for both network access users and administrators. Cisco ISE comes with a set of predefined user attributes and also allows you to create custom attributes. Both types of attributes can be used in conditions that define the authentication policy. You can also define a password policy for user accounts so that passwords meet specified criteria.
Custom User Attributes
You can configure more user-account attributes on the User Custom Attributes window (Administration > Identity Management > Settings > User Custom Attributes). You can also view the list of predefined user attributes in this window. You cannot edit the predefined user attributes.
Enter the required details in the User Custom Attributes pane to add a new custom attribute. The custom attributes and the default values that you add on the User Custom Attributes window are displayed while adding or editing a Network Access user (Administration > Identity Management > Identities > Users > Add/Edit) or Admin user (Administration > System > Admin Access > Administrators > Admin Users > Add/Edit). You can change the default values while adding or editing a Network Access or Admin user.
You can select the following data types for the custom attributes on the User Custom Attributes window:
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String: You can specify the maximum string length (maximum allowed length for a string attribute value).
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Integer: You can configure the minimum and maximum value (specifies the lowest and the highest acceptable integer value).
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Enum: You can specify the following values for each parameter:
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Internal value
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Display value
You can also specify the default parameter. The values that you add in the Display field are displayed while adding or editing a Network Access or Admin user.
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Float
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Password: You can specify the maximum string length.
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Long: You can configure the minimum and maximum value.
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IP: You can specify a default IPv4 or IPv6 address.
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Boolean: You can set either True or False as the default value.
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Date: You can select a date from the calendar and set it as the default value. The date is displayed in yyyy-mm-dd format.
Check the Mandatory check box if you want to make an attribute mandatory while adding or editing a Network Access or Admin user. You can also set default values for the custom attributes.
The custom attributes can be used in the authentication policies. The data type and the allowable range that you set for the custom attributes are applied to the custom attribute values in the policy conditions.
User Authentication Settings
Not all external identity stores allow network access users to change their passwords. See the section for each identity source for more information.
Network use password rules are configured on
.The following section has additional information about some of the fields on the Password Policy tab.
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Required Characters: If you configure a user-password policy that requires upper or lowercase characters, and the user’s language does not support these characters, the user cannot set a password. To support UTF-8 characters, uncheck the following check boxes:
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Lowercase alphabetic characters.
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Uppercase alphabetic characters
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Password Change Delta: Specifies the minimum number of characters that must change when changing the current password to a new password. Cisco ISE does not consider changing the position of a character as a change.
For Example, if the password delta is 3, and the current password is "?Aa1234?", then "?Aa1567?" ("5","6" and "7" are the three new characters) is a valid new password. "?Aa1562?" fails, because "?","2", and "?" characters are in the current password. "Aa1234??" fails, because even though the character positions changed, the same characters are in the current password.
Password change delta also considers the previous X passwords, where X is the value of Password must be different from the previous versions. If your password delta is 3, and your password history is 2, then you must change 4 characters that are not part of the past 2 passwords.
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Dictionary words: Check this check box to restrict the use of any dictionary word, its characters in reverse order, or its letters replaced with other characters.
Substitution of "$" for "s", "@" for "a", "0" for "o", "1" for "l", "!" for "i", "3" for "e", is not permitted. For example, "Pa$$w0rd".
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Default Dictionary: Choose this option to use the default Linux dictionary in Cisco ISE. The default dictionary contains approximately 480,000 English words.
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Custom Dictionary: Choose this option to use your customized dictionary. Click Choose File to select a custom dictionary file. The text file must be of newline-delimited words, .dic extension, and size less than 20 MB.
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You can use the Password Lifetime section to update the password reset interval and reminder. To set the lifetime of the password, check the Disable user account after __ days if password was not changed check box and enter the number of days in the input field. To send a reminder email for password reset, check the Display Reminder __ Days Prior to Password Expiration check box and enter the number of days before which a reminder email should be sent to the email address configured for the network access user. While creating a network access user, you can add the email address in the Administration > Identity Management > Identities > Users > Add Network Access User window to send an email notification for password reset.
Note
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The reminder email is sent from the following email address: iseadminportal@<ISE-Primary-FQDN>. You must explicitly permit access for this sender.
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You cannot customize the email content. The reminder email has the following content: Your network access password will expire on <password expiry date and time>. Please contact your system administrator for assistance.
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Lock/Suspend Account with Incorrect Login Attempts: You can use this option to suspend or lock an account if the login attempt failed for the specified number of times. The valid range is from 3 to 20.
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The Account Disable Policy tab is where you configure rules about when to disable an existing user account. See Disable User Accounts Globally for more information.
Generate Automatic Password for Users and Administrators
You can use the Generate Password option on the user and administrator creation window to generate instant password adhering to Cisco ISE password policies. This helps the users or administrators to use the password generated by Cisco ISE than spending time in thinking of a safe password to be configured.
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Administration > Identity Management > Identities > Users.
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Administration > System > Admin Access > Administrators > Admin Users.
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Settings > Account Settings > Change Password.
Add Users
Cisco ISE allows you to view, create, modify, duplicate, delete, change the status, import, export, or search for attributes of Cisco ISE users.
If you are using a Cisco ISE internal database, you must create an account for any new user who needs access to resources or services on a Cisco ISE network.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose .You can also create users by accessing the page. |
Step 2 |
Click Add (+) to create a new user. |
Step 3 |
Enter values for the fields. |
Step 4 |
Click Submit to create a new user in the Cisco ISE internal database. |
Export Cisco ISE User Data
You might have to export user data from the Cisco ISE internal database. Cisco ISE allows you to export user data in the form of a password-protected csv file.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose . |
Step 2 |
Check the check box that corresponds to the user(s) whose data you want to export. |
Step 3 |
Click Export Selected. |
Step 4 |
Enter a key for encrypting the password in the Key field. |
Step 5 |
Click Start Export to create a users.csv file. |
Step 6 |
Click OK to export the users.csv file. |
Import Cisco ISE Internal Users
You can import new user data into Cisco ISE with a CSV file to create new internal accounts. A template CSV file is available for download while you import user accounts. Sponsors can import users on the Sponsor portal. See Configure Account Content for Sponsor Account Creation for information about configuring the information types that the sponsor guest accounts use.
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If the CSV file contains custom attributes, the data type and the allowable range that you set for the custom attributes will be applied for the custom attribute values during import. |
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose . |
Step 2 |
Click Import to import users from a comma-delimited text file. If you do not have a comma-delimited text file, click Generate a Template to create a CSV file with the heading rows filled in. |
Step 3 |
In the File text box, enter the filename containing the users to import, or click Browse and navigate to the location where the file resides. |
Step 4 |
Check the Create new user(s) and update existing user(s) with new data check box if you want to create new users and update existing users. |
Step 5 |
Click Save. |
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We recommend that you do not delete all the network access users at a time, because this may lead to CPU spike and the services to crash, especially if you are using a very large database. |
Create a User Identity Group
You must create a user identity group before you can assign a user to it.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose .You can also create a user identity group by accessing the page. |
Step 2 |
Enter values in the Name and Description fields. Supported characters for the Name field are space # $ & ‘ ( ) * + - . / @ _ . |
Step 3 |
Click Submit. |
Export User Identity Groups
Cisco ISE allows you to export locally configured user identity groups in the form of a csv file.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > Identity Management > Groups > Identity Groups > User Identity Groups. |
Step 2 |
Check the check box that corresponds to the user identity group that you want to export, and click Export. |
Step 3 |
Click OK. |
Import User Identity Groups
Cisco ISE allows you to import user identity groups in the form of a csv file.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose . |
Step 2 |
Click Generate a Template to get a template to use for the import file. |
Step 3 |
Click Import to import network access users from a comma-delimited text file. |
Step 4 |
Check the Overwrite existing data with new data check box if you want to both add a new user identity group and update existing user identity groups. |
Step 5 |
Click Import. |
Step 6 |
Click Save to save your changes to the Cisco ISE database. |
Configure Maximum Concurrent Sessions
For optimal performance, you can limit the number of concurrent user sessions. You can set the limits at the user level or at the group level. Depending upon the maximum user session configurations, the session count is applied to the user.
You can configure the maximum number of concurrent sessions for each user per ISE node. Sessions above this limit are rejected.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > System > Settings > Max Sessions > User. |
Step 2 |
Do one of the following:
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Step 3 |
Click Save. |
![]() Note |
The maximum concurrent session count is managed by the PSN in which it is configured. This count is not synchronized among the PSNs. If the authentication is done in Cisco ISE, where the maximum concurrent sessions per user or group is configured, and authorization is done in a different proxy server, then the maximum concurrent session limit is applicable only in the Cisco ISE and is not applied to the proxy server. Maximum concurrent session count is implemented in the runtime process and the data is stored only in the memory. If the PSN is restarted, the maximum concurrent session counters are reset. Maximum concurrent session count is case insensitive with respect to usernames irrespective of the Network Access Device used (when the same PSN node is used) |
Maximum Concurrent Sessions for a Group
You can configure the maximum number of concurrent sessions for the identity groups.
Sometimes all the sessions can be used by a few users in the group. Requests from other users to create a new session are rejected because the number of sessions has already reached the maximum configured value. Cisco ISE allows you to configure a maximum session limit for each user in the group; each user belonging to a specific identity group cannot open sessions more than the session limit, irrespective of the number of sessions other users from the same group have opened. When calculating the session limit for a particular user, the lowest configuration value takes the precedence—whether the global session limit per user, the session limit per identity group that the user belongs to, or the session limit per user in the group.
To configure maximum number of concurrent sessions for an identity group:
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > System > Settings > Max Sessions > Group. All the configured identity groups are listed. |
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Step 2 |
Click the Edit icon next to the group that you want to edit and enter the values for the following:
If you want to set the maximum number of concurrent sessions for a group or maximum concurrent sessions for the users in a group as Unlimited, leave the Max Sessions for Group/Max Sessions for User in Group field blank, click the Tick icon, and then click Save. By default, both these values are set as Unlimited. |
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Step 3 |
Click Save. |
Configure Counter Time Limit
You can configure the timeout value for concurrent user sessions.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > System > Settings > Max Sessions > Counter Time Limit. |
Step 2 |
Select one of the following options:
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Step 3 |
Click Save. |
You can reset the session count from the RADIUS Live Logs window. Click the Actions icon displayed on the Identity, Identity Group, or Server column to reset the session count. When you reset a session, the session is deleted from the counter (thereby allowing new sessions). Users will not be disconnected if their sessions are deleted from the counter.
Disable Individual User Accounts
Cisco ISE allows you to disable the user account for each individual user if the disable account date exceeds the date specified by the admin user.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > Identity Management > Identities > Users. |
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Step 2 |
Click Add to create a new user or check the check box next to an existing user and click Edit to edit the existing user details. |
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Step 3 |
Check the Disable account if the date exceeds check box and select the date. This option allows you to disable the user account when the configured date exceeds at user level. You can configure different expiry dates for different users as required. This option overrules the global configuration for each individual user. The configured date can either be the current system date or a future date.
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Step 4 |
Click Submit to configure the account disable policy for an individual user. |
Disable User Accounts Globally
You can disable user accounts on a certain date, several days after account creation or last access date, and after several days of account inactivity.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Choose Administration > Identity Management > Settings > User Authentication Settings > Account Disable Policy. |
Step 2 |
Perform one of the following actions:
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Step 3 |
Click Submit to configure the global account disable policy. |