USING THE DIAMETER PROTOCOL IN COMPUTER NETWORKS WITH AAA ARCHITECTURE IMPLEMENTATION

Анотація

The article considers the operation of the Diameter protocol as a direct successor of the RADIUS protocol. Both are used in computer networks implementing the AAA architecture. In addition, the content of the Diameter message packet, its structure and transmission principles are studied. Organize user connections and sessions.

The AAA architecture is used to implement flexible security policies in computer networks. AAA allows authentication, authorization and accounting of user actions.

The most popular AAA protocol now remains RADIUS, but due to serious shortcomings, it has been replaced by Diameter, which eliminates certain problems of its predecessor and implements its own additional tools that make it a promising replacement for RADIUS.

Diameter uses the usual "client-server" model, however, any host can be a client or a server. The new protocol describes several types of nodes - agents, each of which has its own specific purpose: relay, proxy, redirect, translation. The latter type of agent allows for partial backward compatibility of RADIUS and Diameter.

The Diameter message has a set of fields that uniquely identify the connection and session between the client and the server. However, the connection ID may change as the message is transmitted between the agents.

Unlike RADIUS, you do not need to manually specify a server address when configuring Diameter. Diameter realizes the possibility of dynamic detection of peers, which is another advantage because it simplifies its implementation in large computer networks.

Once a peer is detected, a physical connection and a logical communication session between the nodes are established based on the TCP or SCTP transport protocol (in RADIUS - UDP). The session describes the process of interaction between the client and the server and has a unique identifier Session-Id.

Because Diameter is a status-tracking protocol, it implements a mechanism to verify user usage of a connection, making it even more flexible to use and helping to more efficiently distribute workloads to the server and utilize resources allocated to clients.