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.

Handover Keying (HOKEY) Architecture Design AbstractThe Handover Keying (HOKEY) Working Group seeks to minimize handover delay due to authentication when a peer moves from one point of attachment to another. Work has progressed on two different approaches to reduce handover delay: early authentication (so that authentication does not need to be performed during handover), and reuse of cryptographic material generated during an initial authentication to save time during re-authentication. A basic assumption is that the mobile host or "peer" is initially authenticated using the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), executed between the peer and an EAP server as defined in RFC 3748.This document defines the HOKEY architecture. Specifically, it describes design objectives, the functional environment within which handover keying operates, the functions to be performed by the HOKEY architecture itself, and the assignment of those functions to architectural components. It goes on to illustrate the operation of the architecture within various deployment scenarios that are described more fully in other documents produced by the HOKEY Working Group.

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