steiner@athena.mit.edu (Jennifer Steiner) (04/08/88)
Documentation on MIT Project Athena's authentication service, Kerberos, is available for anonymous ftp on "athena-dist.mit.edu", in ~ftp/pub/kerberos. Documents include the paper given at the Winter 1988 Usenix Conference (text or postscript), a detailed design document (text or postscript), and manual pages. If you can't ftp, and would like a hardcopy, send your request (and US/PTT mail address) to info-kerberos@athena.mit.edu. We are currently running a beta test of the software. When the beta test has been completed, we plan to put the code in the public domain (except for the encryption library, which probably can't be exported out of the U.S.). I'll post a pointer when the code is available. Please post any followup messages to comp.misc. Jennifer Steiner Project Leader, Kerberos Development MIT Project Athena -------- Below is the abstract from the Usenix paper: In an open network computing environment, a workstation cannot be trusted to identify its users correctly to network services. Kerberos provides an alternative approach whereby a trusted third-party authentication service is used to verify users' identities. This paper gives an overview of the Kerberos authentication model as implemented for MIT's Project Athena. It describes the protocols used by clients, servers, and Kerberos to achieve authentication. It also describes the management and replication of the database required. The views of Kerberos as seen by the user, programmer, and administrator are described. Finally, the role of Kerberos in the larger Athena picture is given, along with a list of applications that presently use Kerberos for user authentication. We describe the addition of Kerberos authentication to the Sun Network File System as a case study for integrating Kerberos with an existing application.