Kerberos is an authentication protocol that lets clients and servers reliably verify each other's identity before establishing a network connection. Developed at MIT in the late 1980s, Kerberos takes its name from the three-headed hound in Greek mythology that guards the entrance to Hades. But instead of guarding the underworld, today's Kerberos brings a measure of security to a distributed computer environment, where one computer can access the resources of any other machine on a network.
Paul Hill, information systems senior programmer at MIT and a member of the Kerberos development team since 1992, outlines the benefits of the Kerberos system. First, it has been subjected to public review for over a decade. Second, version 5 of the protocol-the most current version-was developed within the IETF standards process. Finally, Kerberos provides for secure authentication and message integrity, as well as data confidentiality and mutual authentication between a client and a server.
News: Network Security
