Towards a Global AAA Framework for Internet

A common authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) framework enables communication between control structures across several interconnected organizations. It is a requirement to allow users mobility or emergence of new distributed services. The path leading to a global framework contains many obstacles, technical and political, that must be overcome to achieve new generation network features such as pervasive computing. While creating a new framework implementation focused on extensibility, we have found some issues in diameter, the state-of-the-art AAA framework in Internet. This paper summarizes the fundamentals of a AAA architecture, then presents our implementation waaad and our findings on diameter limitations. It shows that diameter is suitable for AAA in the future, but some problems must be addressed first. The next phase-in our evaluation of the diameter framework is the deployment of our implementation in a multi-realm environment, one step closer to a global AAA framework.