Skip to Main Content
RADIUS
book

RADIUS

by Jonathan Hassell
October 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
206 pages
8h 30m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from RADIUS

Chapter 1. An Overview of RADIUS

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to use authentication of any type to gain access to anything. But as long as free enterprise exists and access to private resources is sold, authentication will exist.

You may have experienced authentication as recently as an hour ago, when you used a dial-up Internet account to log on and surf the Web for the latest headlines. You may have checked your corporate email on your PalmPilot to see if your biggest client had returned your message about the newest proposal. And this weekend, when you use a VPN to connect to your office network so you can revise that presentation that’s due early Monday morning, you’ll have to authenticate yourself.

But what goes on behind the scenes when you prove your identity to a computer? After all, the computer has to have a set of processes and protocols to verify that you are indeed who you say you are, find out what you are allowed to access, and finally, tell you all of this. There’s one protocol that does this all: the Remote Access Dialin User Service, or RADIUS.

RADIUS, originally developed by Livingston Enterprises, is an access-control protocol that verifies and authenticates users based on the commonly used challenge/response method. (I’ll talk more about challenge/response authentication later.) While RADIUS has a prominent place among Internet service providers, it also belongs in any environment where central authentication, regulated authorization, and detailed user ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols, 2nd Edition

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols, 2nd Edition

Kevin R. Fall, W. Richard Stevens
TCP/IP Guide

TCP/IP Guide

Charles M. Kozierok

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003226Errata Page