A service category associates a set of authenticators and a set of authentication and authorization policies. When an authenticator attempts to connect the network, the service category for such authenticator determined and the authentication and authorization policies applied. A feature of the present invention is that these policies are segmented into several sub-policies to support multiple services and apply different authentication and authorization policies for each type of service. These sub-policies are a tunnel policy, a credential validation policy, in inner tunnel policy and an authorization policy. Successful negotiation of each policy allows the authenticator to connect a network.
