Cell Phone Detection & Network Access Control (NAC)

This demo shows Bastille’s integration with Aruba ClearPass performing zone-based network access control triggered by an unauthorized cell phone. The presenter carries a T-Mobile phone into a zoned office while on a live video call. The moment the phone crosses into the zone, Bastille detects it and signals ClearPass via API, which immediately cuts network access for every device in that space, including a wired corporate desktop, whose conference call drops mid-session. The demo is shown unedited, with the phone’s position visible on both the live interface and the camera view. A parallel customer use case adds a strobe light via Bastille’s Lenel integration, giving a visible physical alert alongside the network shutdown.

Why It Matters

Standard NAC assumes you can reach the device: an agent, a corporate connection, some point of control. An unauthorized phone on a cellular network offers none of that, which leaves a real gap in SCIFs, boardrooms, and other sensitive spaces. This flips the enforcement model: instead of controlling the untrusted device, you shut down the trusted environment around it. RF detection becomes the trigger for existing network and physical security infrastructure, so the response is automatic rather than dependent on someone noticing a policy violation. For wireless security teams, it’s a practical answer to the “we ban phones but can’t enforce it” problem, and a reminder that RF visibility is only useful when it’s wired into systems that can actually act on it.

Transcript

I’m going to show you a demo now using a phone. It’s the same sort of demo I showed before with Aruba ClearPass, where I did network access control on a corporate-connected laptop.

With phones, you can’t really use that paradigm. The corporate network security team has no access to the phone — especially if it’s an unauthorized phone. It’s on a cellular network, and there’s no agent on it. So what can you do?

One thing several of our customers have come up with is this: if a phone enters a restricted area, first, turn on a strobe light. Second, cut off network access for every device in that space.

So there’s a rogue phone in the space that I don’t trust. Shut everything down, turn on the strobe light, and hold until we can sort out what happened in that room, clear it, and then continue our sensitive conversations.

I don’t have a strobe light in this demo, but we do have customers and demo facilities where the strobe light is part of the equation. People use systems like Lenel to connect the strobe light to Bastille — Bastille has a Lenel integration. Lenel is a physical security system that manages badge readers, alarms, and so on.

In this demo, I’m going to show you the Aruba ClearPass portion, where we NAC an entire zone of devices when a cell phone enters that zone.

On the left, you’re seeing the camera view from the phone I’m carrying. I’m about to enter this office, which is zoned out in our interface. I’m also on a video conference call, live — so none of this is faked. You can see the dot appear on both the live screen and my screenshot.

On the right, you can see the conference call I was on, now complaining that I’ve lost my network connection. It’s the same setup we saw before: this wired desktop computer on the corporate network has lost its connection.

The reason it lost the connection is that my T-Mobile phone entered the zone. The API between Bastille and ClearPass communicated, ClearPass received a signal from Bastille that the zone needs to be NAC’d, and it cut off network access for every device in that zone.

That’s a pretty exciting integration, and a few of our customers are using it today.