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Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (radius) Charter Status: Concluded July, 2000 Chair(s): Carl Rigney 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: 1) 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. 2) By February '96, an informational RFC describing RADIUS Accounting. 3) 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.) 4) 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: 1) 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. 2) RADIUS is not intended as a NAS management protocol; SNMP already exists for that. 3) Management of the Authentication/Authorization database itself is outside the scope. 4) Alternative transport protocols such as IPX or IPv6 appear straightforward, but will not be addressed in this effort. 5) 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. Request for Comments:
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