Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Systems
When a user interacts with an organization’s resources remotely, there needs to be a way of checking the user is legitimate, giving that user access to the correct resources, and then tracking the user’s activities and resource usage. Authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) systems allow users to access a corporate network using one set of credentials, no matter where they are accessing the network from. In this section, we will look at protocols that allow all these functions in one system: RADIUS, TACACS+, and Kerberos.
RADIUS
The Remote Authentication Dial-In Service (RADIUS) is a protocol first published in the 1980s, when dial-up modems were popular, but it is still used today by organizations for SSO access to a company via a virtual private network (VPN). The system allows the user to access the entire network with a single username and password.
The RADIUS system consists of a supplicant...
