Introducing Smartcard Enabled RADIUS Server

This paper introduces an innovative concept of smartcard enabled RADIUS server. We design RADIUS servers in which EAP messages are fully processed by smartcards, called EAP-Servers. When the well known TLS protocol is used as authentication method, this architecture becomes scalable. In that case, concurrent authentication sessions are simultaneously handled by different EAP-Servers, each of them securely embeds an unique X509 certificate and its associated private key. We presents experimental results obtained with commercial components, and demonstrate that system performances, about 5 seconds per RADIUS session, are compatible with today network constraints.