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IETF-84 Proceedings

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RADIUS EXTensions (radext) (WG)

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Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/radext

Chair(s):

Operations and Management Area Area Director(s):

Operations and Management Area Advisor

Benoit Claise

Technical Advisor(s)

Paul Congdon

Meeting Slides:

Charter (as of 2004-07-08):

The RADIUS Extensions Working Group will focus on extensions to the
RADIUS protocol required to define extensions to the standard
attribute space as well as to address cryptographic algorithm
agility and use over new transports. In addition, RADEXT will
work on RADIUS Design Guidelines and define new attributes for
particular applications of authentication, authorization and
accounting such as NAS management and local area network (LAN) usage.

In order to enable interoperation of heterogeneous RADIUS/Diameter
deployments, all RADEXT WG work items MUST contain a Diameter
compatibility section, outlining how interoperability with
Diameter will be maintained.

Furthermore, to ensure backward compatibility with existing RADIUS
implementations, as well as compatibility between RADIUS and Diameter,
the following restrictions are imposed on extensions considered by the
RADEXT WG:

- All documents produced MUST specify means of interoperation with
legacy RADIUS and, if possible, be backward
compatible with existing RADIUS RFCs, including RFCs 2865-2869,
3162, 3575, 3579, 3580, 4668-4673,4675, 5080, 5090 and 5176.
Transport profiles should, if possible, be compatible with RFC 3539.

- All RADIUS work MUST be compatible with equivalent facilities in
Diameter. Where possible, new attributes should be defined so that
the same attribute can be used in both RADIUS and Diameter without
translation. In other cases a translation considerations
section should be included in the specification.

Work Items

The immediate goals of the RADEXT working group are to address the
following issues:

- RADIUS design guidelines. This document will provide guidelines for
design of RADIUS attributes. It will specifically consider how
complex data types may be introduced in a robust manner, maintaining
backwards compatibility with existing RADIUS RFCs, across all the
classes of attributes: Standard, Vendor-Specific and SDO-Specific.
In addition, it will review RADIUS data types and associated
backwards compatibility issues.

- RADIUS Management authorization. This document will define the
use of RADIUS for NAS management over IP.

-RADIUS attribute space extension. The standard RADIUS attribute
space is currently being depleted. This document will provide
additional standard attribute space, while maintaining backward
compatibility with existing attributes.

-RADIUS Cryptographic Algorithm Agility. RADIUS has traditionally
relied on MD5 for both per-packet integrity and authentication as well
as attribute confidentiality. Given the increasingly successful
attacks being mounted against MD5, the ability to support
alternative algorithms is required. This work item will
include documentation of RADIUS crypto-agility requirements,
as well as development of one or more Experimental RFCs providing
support for negotiation of alternative cryptographic algorithms
to protect RADIUS.

- IEEE 802 attributes. New attributes have been proposed to
support IEEE 802 standards for wired and wireless LANs. This
work item will support authentication, authorization and
accounting attributes needed by IEEE 802 groups including
IEEE 802.1, IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16.

- New RADIUS transports. A reliable transport profile for
RADIUS will be developed, as well as specifications for
Secure transports, including TCP/TLS (RADSEC) and UDP/DTLS.

- Documentation of Status-Server usage. A document
describing usage of the Status-Server facility will be
developed.