FreeRADIUS drives RADIUS standards
After a decade of working with RADIUS, and almost 8 years of driving FreeRADIUS, I'm happy to say that FreeRADIUS will finally be mentioned in a standards-track RADIUS RFC. The draft is titled “Common RADIUS Implementation Issues and Suggested Fixes“, and it is currently in “last call” on the IETF RADEXT working group. The document is a “grab bag” of topics, and covers a wide variety of issues in the RADIUS space.
The abstract says:
This document describes common issues seen in RADIUS implementations and suggests some fixes. Where applicable, ambiguities and errors in previous RADIUS specifications are clarified.
I expect that this document will become one of the canonical must-reads for RADIUS implementors. The guidelines it proposes, and clarifications it covers are the result of years of real-world experience with RADIUS implementations.
Plus, it mentions FreeRADIUS! Section 2.1.2 of the document describes an algorithm for managing EAP sessions that was first implemented (so far as I know) in FreeRADIUS by Raghu Dendukuri. The previous method documented in the RFC that defined EAP over RADIUS was complex and fragile. Raghu's design is beautiful in its simplicity. It's so good, in fact, that all RADIUS servers now implement his system for managing EAP sessions.
Not surprisingly, when the opportunity came up to write this document, I jumped at at. It means that I get published as the author of a RADIUS RFC, and that the “FreeRADIUS way” becomes documented as an industry standard. So FreeRADIUS is now officially an industry leader in the RADIUS space!