Priority based radius authentication

A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium encoded with instructions for execution by an authentication server for authenticating a subscriber, the non-transitory machine-readable storage medium comprising:

• instructions for receiving at said authentication server, a request message including a plurality of attributes having respective attribute names and respective attribute values;
• instructions for retrieving from a profile storage, an authentication profile object, wherein each entry has a respective priority field;
• instructions for identifying a plurality of authentication attributes to use for authentication, including a respective associated priority value from the priority field of each entry, from said authentication profile object;
• instructions for extracting attribute values from said request message, corresponding to each authentication attribute;
• and
• instructions for attempting to authenticate said request message based on each of said extracted attribute value in order of the respective associated priority value until said authentication attempt is successful, wherein said attempting to authenticate is preceded by sorting said plurality of authentication attributes in order of the respective associated priority value for each of said authentication attributes.