FreeRADIUS

**The protocol has a precise origin.** In 1991 Merit Network, a non-profit internet provider, needed to manage dial-in access across points of presence run by different organisations. It did not want to distribute usernames and passwords to every remote access server, so it wanted those servers to ask a central one and receive back a yes or a no. Livingston Enterprises built that, and called it Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service.

Livingston is worth a paragraph of its own. Founded in 1986 by Ronald Willens and his son Steven in Pleasanton, California, financed by its founders and then by its own operating profits rather than venture capital, it made the **PortMaster** access server - which by the mid-1990s held something like two-thirds of the ISP market and served over two thousand providers. It had ninety employees. **Lucent acquired it in 1997**, and the RADIUS server it had given away stopped being maintained.

That is the gap Cistron filled, and then FreeRADIUS forked Cistron. So the software authenticating a large fraction of the internet today descends, by two forks, from a program written to solve one non-profit's dial-up problem in 1991.

**The numbers are the part people do not believe.** A survey in November 2006 with over five hundred respondents put daily usage at around a hundred million people - roughly a third of global internet access at the time. More than fifty thousand sites run it, from installations with ten users to ones with over ten million. It underpins **eduroam**, the roaming authentication network used across universities worldwide. If you have ever connected to campus wireless anywhere in Europe, this is what said yes.

It supports more authentication types than any other open-source RADIUS server, and was for a long time the only open-source one implementing EAP at all - which matters because EAP is what 802.1X wireless authentication runs on. Version 2.0.0 in 2008 added virtual servers, IPv6 and a policy language; 3.0.0 in 2013 added RadSec, carrying RADIUS over TLS, which fixed a protocol whose original transport security was a shared secret and MD5.

**And here is why it belongs beside three other entries on this timeline.** Tenable closed its open-source scanner in 2005 to fund the company, and was forked. Rapid7 bought an open-source project and kept it open as a commercial differentiator. Elastic closed one, was forked, and reopened it three years later. **FreeRADIUS did none of that. It stayed open, and became the thing everyone else builds against.** Commercial support exists through a company built around it, which is a different arrangement from selling the software or restricting it.

Alan DeKok has led the project since 1999 - twenty-six years, with a core team that accumulated slowly: Alexander Clouter in 2009, Arran Cudbard-Bell in 2012, Matthew Newton in 2016. **On a timeline mostly composed of acquisitions, rebrands and strategic exits, a piece of infrastructure quietly maintained by the same person for a quarter of a century is the genuinely unusual entry.**