Understanding AAA Framework: Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Explained
Description
This video explains the AAA framework, Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, using practical examples like VPN login and device certificates. Learn how organizations verify user identity, control access, and maintain security logs efficiently at scale.
Keywords
AAA framework, authentication, authorization, accounting, VPN login, certificate authority, access control, network security
Introduction to the AAA Framework
The AAA framework stands for Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, which are essential components of network security systems.
Identification and Authentication
- Identification: The user claims an identity, typically by providing a username.
- Authentication: The system verifies the user’s identity by checking credentials such as passwords or additional factors.
Authorization
- After authentication, the system determines what resources the user can access based on their role or group membership.
- For example, a user in the shipping and receiving department should only access relevant systems, not finance data. For a deeper understanding of how access control works, check out Understanding Professionalism: The AAA Framework.
Accounting
- Security systems log user activities, including login times, data transferred, and logout times, to maintain an audit trail.
Practical Example: VPN Login Using AAA
- A client attempts to connect to a VPN concentrator (firewall or VPN server).
- The concentrator prompts for username and password but does not store user credentials.
- Credentials are verified by a centralized AAA server that holds user information.
- Upon successful authentication, the concentrator grants access to internal resources like file servers. For more on VPN security, see Palo Alto Firewall Basics: Key Configuration Techniques.
Device Authentication Using Digital Certificates
- Devices without human input (e.g., laptops) use digital certificates for authentication.
- A Certificate Authority (CA) issues and digitally signs certificates for devices.
- The device presents its certificate during login, which is verified against the CA’s certificate to confirm authenticity. To learn more about the role of certificates in security, refer to Understanding the CIA Triad: Key Concepts in Computer Security.
Authorization Models for Scalable Access Control
- Directly assigning rights and permissions to each user is inefficient and unscalable.
- Authorization models use abstractions such as roles or groups to manage access.
- Example: Users in the "shipping and receiving" group automatically inherit permissions to access shipping labels, tracking systems, and customer data.
- This group-based model simplifies administration and scales to thousands of users and resources. For insights on managing security in larger networks, check out Comprehensive Overview of Incident Response and Handling in CCNA Cyber Ops.
Summary
The AAA framework ensures secure access by:
- Verifying user or device identity (Authentication).
- Granting appropriate access based on roles or attributes (Authorization).
- Logging activities for accountability (Accounting).
Implementing AAA with centralized servers, digital certificates, and scalable authorization models is critical for managing security in large, distributed networks.
we're all very familiar with the login process you put in your username your password there might be some additional
authentication factors and if all of those are correct you gain access to resources on that system this process
begins with identification where you claim to be a particular user on that system the check between your username
your password and the other authentication factors is referred to as authentication this proves that we
really are who we say we are because we knew the secret password or we had some additional authentication factors that
we could use to help prove that we are that person now that we've identified who we are we now need to determine what
type of access we have and that's done through authorization if we're part of the shipping and receiving department
then we should have access to systems that should only be available to shipping and receiving and we should not
have access to information that might be in the finance department and of course all security systems need
to have a log of exactly what happened so we need to know what time someone logged in how much data may have been
sent or received and what time this person logged out we refer to this entire system as the AAA framework and
this refers to authentication authorization and accounting let's have a look at a
practical example of using AAA we're going to use the example of logging into a VPN n server in this case it would be
a firewall or VPN concentrator in the middle you're on one side of that concentrator and you need to use AAA to
gain access to an internal file server so we'll start with our client on the internet and we'll access the VPN
concentrator which prompts us for a login so we're going to provide a username and password and send that
information over to the VPN concentrator the concentrator itself doesn't have any information about usernames password
wordss authentication factors or anything else and in most organizations all of that information is stored on a
central server and we refer to that as a AAA server this AAA server is going to receive the request from the VPN
concentrator asking if the username password and other information that was provided matches some type of user in
the database and if the match is true it sends back information to the concentrator and says those credentials
are approved at at that point the concentrator knows that we really are the person we claim to be and it allows
us access into the internal file server as a security professional you'll be responsible for managing the security
on hundreds or perhaps even thousands of separate systems and in many cases you'll never have physical access or
even be able to see where those systems might be because they may be located anywhere in the world so the question
now becomes how can we verify that a computer trying to connect to our network is a computer that's authorized
to be on our Network this computer by itself obviously can't type a password to prove who it might be and in most
cases you probably wouldn't want to store a password on one of your systems out in the field anyway so how can you
really confirm that that system is allowed to be on our internal Network how do we provide that additional
authenication in many cases we use a certificate that we put onto this device that is digitally signed and we check
that authentication during the login process this allows anyone needing to provide that verification with a way to
confirm that that really is a company-owned laptop this could be on a VPN concentrator so that it can verify
that the devices coming into the network really are company devices or perhaps it's management software that can
validate that in device that may be either on our local network or anywhere in the world the process for creating
this certificate is relatively straightforward but the one thing that you must have in your environment is
something called a certificate Authority or a CA this is a device or software that is responsible for managing all of
the certificates in our environment on the ca itself you would create a certificate just for that laptop that
certificate is now digitally signed by the certificate Authority so that later on we can verify that it really is an
original certificate from our certificate Authority now we put that certificate on the laptop and anytime we
want to perform an authentication we can use that certificate as an authentication factor and verify that it
really was digitally signed by the certificate Authority so as part of your security infrastructure you would have a
certificate Authority that certificate Authority itself has its own certificate that was signed by a root CA we also
have our laptop in the field and we have pre previously created a device certificate just for this machine and it
has been signed by the ca once we know the ca certificate and we know the device certificate we can then compare
these two certificates and we can see that our device certificate was signed by the certificate Authority that we
trust in our security infrastructure now that we've gone through the authentication process how
do we authorize that device to have access to resources within our Network we would do that by using an
authorization model and there are many different authorization models to choose from we have a big list of these later
on in the video series in section 4.6 we would commonly authorize users and services to have access to certain
types of data and applications the challenge here is how do you create this relationship in a form that's able to
easily scale for tens hundreds or even thousands of users in many envir requirements we accomplish this by
taking the users and services and putting an authorization model right in the middle before you access the data in
the applications these are commonly defined by roles organizations attributes and many other types of
characteristics let's say that you had no authorization model at all we would create a series of Rights and
permissions where the user has rights to access the resource the problem is that this doesn't scale very well let's take
an example of somebody in the shipping and receiving department this is someone who needs access to a large number of
systems a lot of data maybe there's tracking information shipping labels databases of customers and we would
create separate rights and permissions so that anytime this person logged in we would need to give them rights to create
a shipping label track a shipment view monthly shipment reports access customer data and perhaps anything else they need
for their day-to-day operations now if this is the only person in shipping and receiving this is a relatively easy
process but what if you're part of a larger organization that has tens or hundreds of people in shipping and
receiving you can see it would be difficult to take every single user account and manually set up rights and
permissions for every single resource that they need access to in this case there's only three resources but imagine
if there were tens or hundreds of resources you would need to set set those up for the tens or hundreds of
users you can see now why this would be very difficult to scale to be able to scale we would need to use an
authorization model sometimes you'll hear this referred to as an abstraction that allows us to separate the users
from the information they're trying to access this greatly streamlines the process of administering these large
number of users or large number of resources and we can support a very very large infrastructure just with a very
simple set of abstractions here's how this would work we'd have the same user in shipping and receiving and we will
add them to a group called shipping and receiving we set this group up originally so that anybody added to the
shipping and receiving group would have access to create a shipping label track a shipment view monthly shipment reports
have access to customer contact information and anything else you would need in shipping and receiving now let's
add in our tens or hundreds of users instead of manually mapping every single user to the individual authorizations
they need we just simply add all of the users to the shipping and receiving group with this one single addition we
can give tens or hundreds or thousands of users access to the resources they might need regardless of how many users
there are and regardless of how many resources they need to access
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