Authentication Conversion - ZyXEL Communications omni TA128 User Manual

PPP HDLC framing is described in RFC1662. PPP over ISDN is
described in RFC1618.
Related command:
ATB40 - Async to Sync PPP conversion.

Authentication conversion

After a link is established, it is necessary to authenticate the peer
for security reasons. There are two popular authentication methods.
One is Password Authentication Protocol (PAP) and the other is
Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP). PAP is
less secure because it transmits the username/password in plain
text form. Unlike PAP, CHAP transmits the username/password in
coded form. Some ISPs may support CHAP as the only method
for authentication. For those applications which do not support
CHAP, the TA128 converts PAP into CHAP. By default, the
PAP/CHAP conversion is always activated, so the authentication
from the TA128 to PC is always PAP. That means you must
configure your software to accept plain text as password
authentication. Do not worry about password leakage, the TA128
will send the password out in hashed form by CHAP. Sometimes
CHAP can not be supported by the ISP. You may set S87.2=1 to
use PAP only. If you do not want to do authentication at all, set
S118.3=1 to disable the conversion.
: Disabling authentication may cause problems in Windows 95.
O O
NOTE
CHAP is described in RFC1994 and PAP is described in RFC1334.
The only hash method supported by CHAP is MD5, MS-CHAP
isn't supported yet. At this time authentication conversion works
for clients only.
Related commands:
ATS118.3 = 1 - Disable authentication conversion.
ATS118.3 = 0 - Enable authentication conversion depends on
S87.2 (default).
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