AAA stands for authentication, authorization and accounting. Authentication asks who you are, usually with a username and password. Authorization decides what you are allowed to do, such as which commands you may run or which privilege level you receive. Accounting records what you did and when, for audit and troubleshooting. Applying AAA to routers and switches means administrators log in with individual accounts rather than a shared password, so their actions can be controlled, logged and traced back to a person, and a departing employee's access can be removed in one place.
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