RADIUS authentication module for Python 1.5.2+

(c) 1999 Stuart Bishop zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au

This module provides basic RADIUS client capabilities, allowing your Python code to authenticate against any RFC2138 compliant RADIUS server.

Installation

The following command will install radius.py into your Python modules library:

python setup.py install

This command will generally need to be run with an administrative level account (root under Unix, Administrator under NT etc.).

RPM Package

You can build an RPM package for py-radius using the following procedure.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/rpmbuild/SOURCES
$ python setup.py sdist
$ cp dist/*.tar.gz $HOME/rpmbuild/SOURCES
$ rpmbuild -ba py-radius.spec

Usage

The radius.py module can be run from the command line, providing a minimal RADIUS client to test out RADIUS servers:

$ python radius.py

The module defines the following items:

authenticate(username, password, secret, host='radius', port=1645)

A simple, thread safe function to authenticate off a RADIUS server with the minimum possible fuss. Returns 1 on success, 0 on failure. May throw a NoResponse or SocketError exception.

RADIUS(secret, host='radius', port=1645)

Return a new instance of the RADIUS class. RADIUS objects provide a more efficient interface if your code makes many calls to the same RADIUS server. RADIUS objects should not be shared between threads, unless only one thread accesses the authenticate method at a time.

NoResponse

Exception thrown if no response or no valid responses are received.

SocketError

Subclass of NoResponse. Exception thrown if an exception is thrown from Python's socket module.

RADIUS instances have the following methods and attributes available:

authenticate(username, password)

Authenticate a username/password combination. Returns 1 on success or 0 on failure. May throw a NoResponse or SocketError exception.

closesocket()

Close the outgoing UDP socket. Called automatically in the RADIUS instance's destructor.

retries

The number of times the authenticate method tries to authenticate before returning a NoResponse exception. Defaults to 3.

timeout

The number of seconds the authenticate method waits for a response from the RADIUS server before giving up and retrying. Defaults to 5.

Example

#!/bin/env python
from getpass import getpass
from radius import RADIUS

host = raw_input("Host? (default = 'radius')")
port = raw_input('Port? (default = 1645) ')

if not host: host = 'radius'

if port: port = int(port)
else: port = 1645

secret = ''
uname,passwd = None,None
while not secret: secret = getpass('RADIUS Secret? ')
while not uname:  uname  = raw_input("Username? ")
while not passwd: passwd = getpass("Password? ")

r = RADIUS(secret,host,port)
r.timeout = 10


if r.authenticate(uname,passwd):
    print "Authentication Succeeded"
else:
    print "Authentication Failed"