Kerberos: The Definitive Guide

DCE

The Distributed Computing Environment , or DCE, is a set of libraries and services that enable organizations to build cross-platform, integrated computing environments. It includes components that enable applications to communicate across a diverse set of platforms and securely locate and access information, whether it’s in the same room on a local network or across the globe over the Internet. DCE provides many services to make this possible, including directory services, remote procedure calls, and time-synchronization. Most notable to our discussion, it provides a security service, which just happens to be based on Kerberos 5.

Work on DCE began in 1989, and was developed through a committee of vendors who have submitted various bits and pieces. The work was coordinated by The Open Group, an organization that is most widely known for the Motif widget set. Unfortunately, while the concepts that underlie DCE were revolutionary and ahead of their time, DCE was difficult to install and administer, and early versions were riddled with bugs. Today, DCE itself is not in wide use, but the concepts behind it have been integrated in most modern operating systems today, including Windows 2000 and above.

In 1997, The Open Group released the source code to the latest version of DCE, 1.2.2, to download for free from their web site. More information on DCE, including information on how to download Free DCE, can be found at http://www.opengroup.org/dce/.