A recent IT Architect article goes into some of the IETF’s work in the AAA space focusing mainly on the continued viability of RADIUS and why the transition to Diameter isn’t moving very quickly. This is a good summary on the state of things though I might quibble with the author’s classification of RADIUS as sexy.
Archive for January, 2006
RADIUS, Diameter and the IETF
Monday, January 30th, 2006Consumer 802.1x
Thursday, January 12th, 2006I hope everyone had a great holiday, I figured a post about toys might be appropriate…
Fresh from CES, Broadcom is announcing a WiFi video phone chipset which includes 802.1x and WPA. It will be interesting to see how the commercial WiFi market embraces 802.1x as well as the home telephony space. Certainly using 802.1x as a mechanism for accessing the network makes sense and by having everything in a single handset you overcome some of the supplicant challenges enterprises are dealing with today. In theory you could also use the 802.1x authentication credentials to differentiate service to users. Federated hotspot roaming can’t be far behind, but the requirements on the back-end AAA infrastructure will be tremendous.
Along this same vein, Kodak announced one of their cameras would support 802.1x a while back. This strikes me as a tad ambitious as I wouldn’t expect any home users to advance beyond WPA personal for some time. That said, Kodak likely didn’t self-develop the supplicant and perhaps it came along for free with the rest of the WPA toolkit. Somehow I wouldn’t expect EAP-TLS anytime soon.