Kerberos

From Citizendium
Revision as of 02:52, 20 March 2010 by imported>Sandy Harris
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is developing and not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

Kerberos is a network authentication system developed at MIT [1] and used (not without controversy [2]) by all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 2000 [3]. It is also used by various Unix-based systems. A central trusted server provides "tickets" which allow other machines to authenticate each other.

The Kerberos protocol is specified in RFC 4120. There is an active working group at the IETF with many more documents. Microsoft's usage is documented in RFC 3244 and RFC 4757.

There is a FAQ. IBM provide a Kerberos primer.