Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (radius)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of that in effect at the time of the 38th IETF Meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. It may now be out-of-date.

Chair(s): 

Carl Rigney <cdr@livingston.com>

Operations and Management Area Director(s): 

Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>
Michael O'Dell <mo@uu.net>
Deirdre Kostick <kostick@qsun.att.com>

Mailing Lists: 

General Discussion:ietf-radius@livingston.com
To Subscribe: ietf-radius-request@livingston.com
In Body: subscribe ietf-radius
Archive: ftp://ftp.livingston.com/pub/radius/archive

Description of Working Group: 

Background 

The original specification for and implementation of RADIUS was written by Steve Willens of Livingston Enterprises in response to a need outlined by the earlier NASREQ working group, and has been deployed by multiple vendors over the past 3 years. 

No other working group appears to be addressing the topic of communicating authentication and authorization information between a Network Access Server and a central authentication & authorization server, and general consensus is that standardization of such a protocol would be extremely useful. 

This working group will produce four documents:

·   By early '96, an informational RFC documenting the RADIUS protocol already deployed for use by a Network Access Server (NAS) to communicate with a remote Authentication & Authorization database server, with minor amendments reflecting field experience of several implementations over several years at hundreds of sites. 
·   By February '96, an informational RFC describing RADIUS Accounting. 
·   By early '97, a full standard RFC documenting the RADIUS protocol, addressing any operational or security issues raised concerning the informational RFC. This document will obsolete goal 1. (If the Internet-Draft for goal 1 is deemed suitable by the IESG for release as a Proposed Standard instead of informational, then goals 1 and 3 will be merged.) 
·   Starting in February '96 and concluding in '97, a RADIUS Extensions RFC documenting extensions for additional functionality within the RADIUS framework, which will be interoperable with the base RADIUS defined in the document for goal 3.

The intent in goals 1 through 3 are to document the protocol as it exists and is used currently, in such a way as to allow interoperable implementations to be written from the RFC. Minor modifications to enhance interoperability or operation based on field experience are suitable, major overhauls are outside the scope of this working group's charter. Goal 4 is to provide a mechanism for additional features deemed widely useful to be added to the existing framework, for example to provide better support for EAP. 

Clearly outside the scope of the charter are the following:

·   NAS Standardization is outside the scope. We're defining standard RADIUS, not a standard encompassing everything about network access servers. This effort does not require NASes to implement RADIUS; it just defines how the RADIUS Protocol works on NASes that do implement RADIUS. 
·   RADIUS is not intended as a NAS management protocol; SNMP already exists for that. 
·   Management of the Authentication/Authorization database itself is outside the scope. 
·   Alternative transport protocols such as IPX or IPv6 appear straightforward, but will not be addressed in this effort. 
·   The flexibility and generality of RADIUS have led to its use for other applications, but this Working Group is addressing only those uses involving user dial-in to Network Access Servers.
Goals and Milestones:

Done 



Submit revised Radius Accounting Internet-Draft.

Done 



Meet at Dallas IETF.

Done 



Submit revised Radius Internet-Draft.

Jan 96 



Submit Radius Accounting Internet-Draft to IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC.

Jan 96 



Submit Radius Internet-Draft to IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC.

Feb 96 



Submit Internet-Draft on Radius Extensions.

Mar 96 



Meet at LA IETF to deal with any pending issues on Radius or Radius Accounting Internet-Drafts.

Apr 96 



Submit Radius protocol Internet-Draft to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

May 96 



Submit revised Radius Extensions document as Internet-Draft.

Nov 96 



Submit Radius Protocol to IESG to be considered for elevation to Draft Standard.

Internet-Drafts: 

· Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) 

· Implementation of Mandatory Tunneling via RADIUS 

· RADIUS Attributes for Tunnel Protocol Support 

· Extensible Authentication Protocol Support in RADIUS 

· RADIUS Extensions 

· RADIUS Server MIB 

· RADIUS Client MIB

Request For Comments:

RFC 

Status 

Title

RFC2059 

RADIUS Accounting

Current Meeting Report

None Received 

Slides

None Received 

Attendees List

TOC