Hierarchical EAP Back-End Authenticator State Machine?

Authentication is a basic requirement for telecommunication network market for allowing resources to the legitimate users. Extended Authentication Protocol (EAP) is a widely used protocol for authentication. EAP is basically a framework which supports several authentication methods. The several authentication methods supported by a single protocol make this protocol a complex one. To simplify this Complexity State Machines are used. Extended Authentication Protocol (EAP) also has the state machines provided by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 1) EAP peer 2) EAP stand-alone authenticator which is non-pass-through 3) EAP backend authenticator which is used for Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) servers, and 4) EAP full authenticator which is for both local and pass-through, are four state machines presented by IETF. These states machines are created using basic single level state machine which reduces the complexity of state machine up to some point. In this paper we will see how we can reduce the architectural complexity using Hierarchical State Machine. Here we will try to represent the hierarchical state machine structure and implement it for the Back-end Authenticator State Machine.