Patent ID: 7865727

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving at a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) a proactively generated and transmitted authentication request from a cable modem, said authentication request including an attribute specifying a physical address of the cable modem and initiating an authentication process involving the cable modem, the CMTS, and a centralized server, wherein the authentication process is initiated by the cable modem generating and transmitting the authentication request; as part of the authentication process initiated by the cable modem, forwarding at least a portion of said authentication request to the centralized server to cause a network certificate to be received by the cable modem; as part of the authentication process initiated by the cable modem, after the network certificate is received by the cable modem, receiving at the CMTS an authorization response from the cable modem, wherein the authorization response includes an authentication criterion for the cable modem; as part of the authentication process initiated by the cable modem, extracting a forwarding message from the authorization response and sending the forwarding message to the centralized server; as part of the authentication process initiated by the cable modem, receiving back a communication to establish a session key on the cable modem and forwarding a representation of the communication to the cable modem for establishment of the session key on the cable modem; completing ranging with the cable modem before sending a certificate request that elicits the authorization response; and registering the cable modem after the authentication process.