AAA is the abbreviation of Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting. It is a management mechanism for network security and provides three security functions: authentication, authorization, and accounting. Users can only use one or more security services provided by AAA. For example, if the company only wants employees to perform identity authentication when accessing some specific resources, then the network administrator only needs to configure the authentication server. However, if you want to record the use of the network by employees, you also need to configure an accounting server.
After studying this chapter, we should be able to:
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- Master the fundamentals of AAA certification
- Master the basic configuration of AAA authentication
- Familiar with the working process of AAA certification
13.1 Introduction to AAA
Access control is used to control which users can access the network and the network resources that can be accessed. AAA is the abbreviation of Authentication (authentication), Authorization (authorization) and Accounting (accounting), and it provides a management framework for configuring access control on the Network Access Server (NAS) device.