RADIUS

Key Points About AAA Architecture

The AAA architecture, simply put, is an attempt to map out a design of how the AAA pieces fit together. AAA implementations can be as simple or as complex as they need to be, mainly because of the efforts of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) AAA Architecture Working Group to make a model as application-neutral as possible. In other words, the AAA model is designed to work in environments with varied user requirements and equally varied network design. There are some key attributes of the model that make this possible.

First, the AAA model depends on the client/server interaction, in which a client system requests the services or resources of a server system. In simple implementations, these roles generally stick—the server never acts as the client and vice versa. Client/server environments allow for a good load-balancing design, in which high availability and response time are critical. Servers can be distributed and decentralized among the network. Contrast this with the opposite network model, a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. With P2P networks, all systems display characteristics of both client and server systems, which can introduce such demons as processing delays and unavailability.

A proxying capability is a slight variation of this. An AAA server can be configured to authorize a request or pass it along to another AAA server, which will then make the appropriate provisions or pass it along again. In essence, a proxy chain is created, ...