Cisco Certified Network Professional CCNP Security SISAS Study Guide

Chapter 1: Identity Management/Secure Access
AAA Concepts In the previous section, different techniques are explained to stop an attacker from getting unauthorized access to network infrastructure. Those users who are required to access networking devices for maintenance or for configuration also needs to have authorization as well as a proper audit trail so that the culprit will be identified at the hour of need. AAA is all about implementing the above-mentioned goals with some centralization command can control. For example, an organization has 100 devices located at different locations geographically. One method is to access these devices one by one and to add a local database containing usernames and passwords of all authorized persons. The second solution is to have a centralized server containing the database with each device pointing to server for taking decision.
AAA Components AAA is a modular framework and it tries to cater all kinds of traffic over the network either as a network administrator trying to access a networking device or as an end user trying to send data traffic out of local LAN.