Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory, 3rd Edition

15.3 Kerberos

Kerberos (named for the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades) is a real-world implementation of a symmetric cryptography protocol whose purpose is to provide strong levels of authentication and security in key exchange between users in a network. Here we use the term users loosely, as a user might be an individual, or it might be a program requesting communication with another program. Kerberos grew out of a larger development project at MIT known as Project Athena. The purpose of Athena was to provide a huge network of computer workstations for the undergraduate student body at MIT, allowing students to access their files easily from anywhere on the network. As one might guess, such a development quickly raised questions ...