Cisco Router Firewall Security

Chapter 5. Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting

Chapter 3, “Accessing a Router,” discussed some basic methods of securing access to your router, including using the username command to assign accounts to multiple administrators accessing your router. However, the authentication methods discussed in Chapter 3 do not scale well. If you have 100 routers, you probably do not want the hassle of maintaining all of these accounts on each of these routers.

Authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) enables you to centralize this process. Many companies centralize AAA functions by purchasing a security server that contains all of the security polices that define the list of users and what they are allowed to do. When authenticating or ...