AAA is becoming ubiquitous

I'm at IETF 68 in Prague. I'm sure Prague is a nice city, but I'm not seeing much more than the conference hotel, and a few local watering holes. I always liked the move “Kafka”, and wanted to go see the sites where various scenes were shot. Maybe next time.

The IETF meetings, though, are enlightening. I haven't been following many standards groups, but when I sit in on the meeting rooms, I noticed that AAA was everywhere. And most of it was RADIUS.

I think the network is at the point where network protocols are converging. In order to do anything in an authenticated, accounted, secure, manner, there's a minimum set of things that have to be done. The result is that it seems most protocols now include references to other protocols to enable this, that, or the other thing. (Sort of like my RADIUS + DTLS draft, which proposes to solve the RADIUS cryptography problems by using TLS.)

The wide-spread use of AAA means I'll have to follow more working groups, and do so in more detail. What impact this has on my free time is yet to be determined.

The good news is that I'm finding more time to work on the book, and on FreeRADIUS. I'm now targetting the book at Version 2.0, with the idea of releasing the book shortly after Version 2.0 comes out. I hope both happen soon.