In this mode, p
acket transmission is terminated at authenticator systems and the EAP packets are
mapped into RADIUS packets. Authentication and accounting are accomplished through RADIUS
protocol.
In this mode, PAP or CHAP is employed between the switch and the RADIUS server. This switch
supports the PAP terminating mode. The authentication procedure of PAP is illustrated in the
following figure.
Figure 1
1-19 PAP Authentication Procedure
In PAP mode, the switch encrypts the password and sends the user name, the
randomly-generated key, and the supplicant system-encrypted password to the RADIUS server for
further authentication. Whereas the randomly-generated key in EAP-MD5 relay mode is generated
by the authentication server, and the switch is responsible to encapsulate the authentication
packet and forward it to the RADIUS server.
802.1X Timer
In 802.1 x authentication, the following timers are used to ensure that the supplicant system, the
switch, and the RADIUS server interact in an orderly way:
(1) Supplicant system timer (Supplicant Timeout): This timer is triggered by the switch
after the switch sends a request packet to a supplicant system. The switch will resend the
request packet to the supplicant system if the supplicant system fails to respond in the
specified timeout period.
(2) RADIUS server timer (Server Timeout): This timer is triggered by the switch after the
switch sends an authentication request packet to RADIUS server. The switch will resend
the authentication request packet if the RADIUS server fails to respond in the specified
timeout period.
(3) Quiet-period timer (Quiet Period): This timer sets the quiet-period. When a supplicant
system fails to pass the authentication, the switch quiets for the specified period before it
processes another authentication request re-initiated by the supplicant system.
Guest VLAN
Guest VLAN function enables the supplicants that do not pass the authentication to access the
specific network resource.
By default, all the ports connected to the supplicants belong to a VLAN, i.e. Guest VLAN. Users
belonging to the Guest VLAN can access the resources of the Guest VLAN without being
Switch
RADIUS
EAP
Authentication Server
Supplicant System
EAPOL-Start
EAP-Request/Identity
EAP-Response/Identity
EAP-Request
RADIUS-Access-Request
EAP-Response
RADIUS-Access-Accept
EAP-Success
160