Overview

IntroductionIntroduction

The term Kerberos was derived from the Greek mythology. Cerberus is the latin variant of Kerberos, who guarded the entrance of Hades, the Greek hell. The Kerberos security system, on the other hand, guards electronic transmissions that are sent across a network.

Kerberos is a mature network authentication protocol based on the RFC 1510 (The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5)) specification of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is designed to provide strong authentication for client or server applications using the shared secret key cryptography.

The Kerberos server is based on a distributed client/server architecture. It ensures secure communication in a networked environment by leveraging individual trust relationships. It then brokers that trust

across enterprise wide, distributed client/server networks.

Chapter 1

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