Greetings- Ran into a question as follows: "In radius security architecture what is the network access server", and the answer is the authenticator. This makes me wonder how is this different from TACACS
+? In both, there is a NAS that receives the request from the user and checks with the server ( radius or TACACS+) to see if the user can access the network resources. Can anyone explain the difference in architecture of terminology please?
Not sure what is really being asked here, but both TACACs and RADIUS are Network Access Server (NAS) devices. While TACACs can have daughter boxes that actually authenticate and a different box as the true master, I believe RADIUS offers all those same features (with some differences of course). The bottom line is, this question is asking you what a NAS is, and I'm pretty sure the answer is 'the authenticator' regardless of whether the question said RADIUS or TACACs architecture. This is because the NAS device is receiving authentication requests, including credentials, and acting the role as the authenticator which decides if access is granted or denied, and what level of access those credentials shall get.
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