Information
Centralized management of user accounts and authentication increases the administrative access to the switch. This control is a particularly important protection against the insider threat. With robust centralized management, audit records for administrator account access to the organization's network devices can be more readily analyzed for trends and anomalies. The alternative method of defining administrator accounts on each device exposes the device configuration to remote access authentication attacks and system administrators with multiple authenticators for each network device.
Solution
Step 1: Configure the Cisco switch to use an authentication server as shown in the following example:
SW4(config)#radius host 10.1.48.2 key xxxxxx
Step 2: Configure the authentication order to use the authentication server as primary source for authentication as shown in the following example:
SW4(config)#aaa authentication login LOGIN_AUTHENTICATION group radius local
Step 3: Configure all network connections associated with a device management to use an authentication server for the purpose of login authentication.
SW4(config)#line vty 0 4
SW4(config-line)#login authentication LOGIN_AUTHENTICATION
SW4(config-line)#exit
SW4(config)#line con 0
SW4(config-line)#login authentication LOGIN_AUTHENTICATION
SW4(config-line)#exit
SW4(config)#ip http authentication aaa login-authentication LOGIN_AUTHENTICATION