RADIUS

A Brief History

RADIUS, like most innovative products, was built from a need. In this case, the need was to have a method of authenticating, authorizing, and accounting for users needing access to heterogeneous computing resources. Merit Networks, a big player in creating the Internet as we know it, operated a pool of dial-up resources across California. At the time, authentication methods were peculiar to specific pieces of equipment, which added a lot of overhead and didn’t allow for much in the way of management flexibility and reporting. As the dial-up user group grew, the corporation realized they needed a mechanism more flexible and extensible than remaining with their proprietary, unwieldy equipment and scripts. Merit sent out a request for proposal, and Livingston Enterprises was one of the first respondents. Representatives for Merit and Livingston contacted each other, and after meeting at a conference, a very early version of RADIUS was written. More software was constructed to operate between the service equipment Livingston manufactured and the RADIUS server at Merit, which was operating with Unix. The developer of RADIUS, Steve Willins, still remains on the RFC document. From that point on, Livingston Enterprises became Lucent, and Merit and Lucent took the RADIUS protocol through the steps to formalization and industry acceptance. Both companies now offer a RADIUS server to the public at no charge.