Project AAA RADIUS

The College of Technology AT&T Lab is a campus-wide network that has a large number of routers and other network devices that are available for research and learning purposes. Access to devices at the moment is being managed locally. A RADIUS server, which provides Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) services, can alleviate the need to manually configure each device every time a new testing environment needs to be implemented. The RADIUS protocol includes the ability for virtually any type of network device to authenticate users for all different levels of access. A RADIUS server can be used to unify the access lists for all of the devices and allow the lab manager(s) to specify individual access rights to different users rather than relying on a small handful of logins setup manually on each device. In addition, a RADIUS server can also serve to modify system images on the network devices based on the needs of the lab at any time.

To accomplish this task we have chosen to build our RADIUS server using commonly available open source software, Ubuntu Server version 8.04 LTS (long term support) installed as a LAMP (Linux Apache mySQL PHP) configuration as our server operating system. On top of that we intend to install FreeRADIUS as our RADIUS server. We also intend on installing WEBMIN for remote web administration of the Linux server and most of its components and then DaloRADIUS for remote web administration of the RADIUS server itself. Our goal is to setup FreeRADIUS to use mySQL to store its data instead of flat text files. This promotes better security by adding another access layer before reaching the user data such as passwords and permissions but it also has the potential to speed up access requests by offloading the data searching procedures to a tool designed specifically for the task, especially when a less than trivial number of users or permissions are employed.

Students:
Kris Hokanson
Nick Zucklewski

Lab Instructor:
Sergio Chacon