Technical Information - Nokia A032 Manual

Technical information

Radius overview
20
Radius is a simple authentication protocol for
remote clients. The name Radius comes from
the words Remote Authentication Dial In User
Service. The Radius protocol has traditionally
been used in modem pools but nowadays its
use has been expanded to include firewall
authentication, amongst other things. The AP
implementation of Radius widens the scope of
the protocol to include Wireless LAN clients
and the provision the key exchange as part of
authentication scheme.
The basic characteristics and assumptions are
following:
• Radius is simple protocol where all
messages are encoded on protocol specific
way using a byte a smallest single field so
no ASN.1 or any other kind bit-based
message coding scheme is used.
• Radius is stateless protocol that uses UDP
for sending protocol packet. In practice this
means that Radius is fairly simple to
implement on the server side but client
needs to have some short of retransmission
capabilities for lost packets.
• There is no encryption of the messages
(except the password) so Radius assumes
that authentication is performed inside a
trusted network (for example, intranet).
Nokia A032 Addendum