Architecture Overview

Overview of Radiator Server's architecture, request flow, and core components including async processing, protocol servers, policies, handlers, and execution pipelines.

Architecture Overview

Radiator Server is a high-performance AAA server built with Rust, designed for async processing and modern cloud and on premises environments. It is designed with security and scalability as primary objectives.

Testing is fully automated with high test coverage using unit, integration, performance and UI testing frameworks.

Modern encryption for data in transit and passwords are built into the system.

Request Flow

The following diagram illustrates how Radius authentication requests flow through Radiator Server:

This is the flow irrespective of the protocol used.

Server

The server handles incoming requests the following protocols.

  • RADIUS: UDP, TCP, TCP with TLS (RadSec)
  • TACACS+: TCP with optional TLS
  • HTTP: Customizable web server for constructing APIs with JSON support

It also handles networking related items. Like ip access lists, rate limiting, PROXY protocol support and other similar activities.

AaaContext

The AaaContext is a concurrent, thread-safe context that holds all request state.

See Execution Context for available variables and namespaces.

Policy & Handler

Server routes requests to appropriate handlers based on conditional expressions. Policies can select handlers based on request attributes, client identity, or any variable in the context.

See Policy configuration and Handler conditions for details.

Handle contains execution pipelines for doing business logic. Main items are @execute and @final-execute.

Actions

Individual processing units within pipelines:

  • Protocol Actions: PAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP, EAP
  • Backend Actions: SQL queries, LDAP lookups, HTTP calls
  • Data Actions: Set/copy attributes, conditions, transformations
  • Control Actions: Stop, continue, log
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