BSIT 220-T301 Week 5 Blog

 Welcome again!

It is Week 5 and I want to talk about a section of the book that went over AAA, or Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting. These components work together to ensure that only authorized users and devices have access to resources on the network as well as their activities are logged and audited appropriately. 


Authentication - verifies that the user or devices attempting to access the network is who or what they say they are. Some Authentication methods are:

    Username and Password - just your basic username and password
    Multi-factor authentication (MFA) - requires users to provide additional verification factors other than their password. SMS code, biometric scans, or hardware tokens. 
    Certificates - Digital certificates issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to authenticate devices or users .


Authorization - determines the actions and resources that authenticated users or devices are permitted to access after they have been successfully authenticated. 

    Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Assigns permissions based on predefined roles within the organization

    Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC): Uses attributes (such as user attributes, resource attributes, and environmental conditions) to determine access rights dynamically.


Accounting - involves tracking and logging user activities and resource usage for auditing, billing, and compliance purposes. It provides visibility into who accessed what resources, when they accessed them, and what actions they performed. Accounting helps businesses with:

    Audit and Compliance: maintaining records of user actions to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements

    Billing and Usage: tracking resource consumption for billing purposes. 

 AAA ensures that only authorized entities can access the network resources which will reduce the risk or unauthorized access and data breaches. 

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