High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The term supplicant is used in the IEEE 802.1X standard, where the supplicant is an entity at one end of a point-to-point LAN segment that seeks to be authenticated by an authenticator attached to the other end of that link. In practice, a supplicant is a software application installed on an end-user`s computer. The user invokes the supplicant and submits credentials to connect the computer to a secure network. If the authentication is successful, the authenticator typically allows the computer to connect to the network.