With people’s ever-increasing online activity, communication service providers are faced with increasingly growing performance requirements for their networks. And while computing power grows as well, not all software can utilise the resources and scale to meet these increasing performance requirements.

We’ve closely monitored the feedback from our existing and prospective customers, and designed and built a new policy engine, Radiator 10, from ground up to handle the highest performance requirements, setting the bar for what the performance of a modern RADIUS server should look like.

We conducted a case study to showcase how our product excels in EAP-TLS authentication, demonstrating its ability to process an industry-leading number of authentication transactions per second. In this case study, we showcase how our solution not only enhances security but also delivers unparalleled authentication speed, ensuring smooth
and secure access for thousands of users simultaneously.

Case study

The performance tests were conducted on standard-sized Google Compute Engine machines using  a bash script to repeatedly execute the eapol_test tool for EAP-TLS authentication. The testing was done with two deployments, one for RADIUS/UDP and one for RadSec.

In the RADIUS/UDP deployment, the Client instances sent direct EAP-TLS authentication requests to authenticating Radiator 10 instance. In the RadSec deployment, Client instances sent RADIUS EAP-TLS authentication requests to Radiator 10 proxy instances, which proxied the requests over RadSec to an authenticating Radiator 10 instance.

For more information about the test setups, please see the case study paper here.

Results

The tests concluded that on the test setup, Radiator 10 could process over 4200 RADIUS EAP-TLSv1.3 requests per second. With parallel RadSec connections from four proxy instances, Radiator processed over 9900 EAP-TLSv1.3 authentications per second. With an average EAP-TLS request requiring 8.4 total RADIUS packet exchanges, this means that Radiator 10 exchanged over 83 000 RADIUS packets per second over the 3 500 000 EAP-TLS authentication test set.

For more results and considerations, please see the case study paper here.

If you have questions about the performance testing, or want to discuss how Radiator 10 products, Radiator Policy Server and Radiator Core, could help you scale up your deployment, please do not hesitate to contact sales@radiatorsoftware.com