Service and host principals
Users aren’t the only ones assigned principals in a Kerberos realm; hosts and servers offering Kerberos services also have principals. Since, in Kerberos, each endpoint of a connection can request mutual authentication, both endpoints require an identity and a key. Therefore, every service and host that a user can connect to through Kerberos authentication requires a service principal.
Services principals are slightly different than user principals. The username component in a service principal is the name of the service that the principal represents. In the case of a host principal, the username is “host.” To distinguish service principals for the same service but on different hostnames, the instance component contains the hostname of the machine the service principal is located on. Services that use Kerberos authentication are said to be Kerberized .
In addition to host and service principals, the Kerberos system itself contains several principals. The most important of these “special” principals is the krbtgt principal. We’ll see examples of service and host principals in the next two sections, which discuss what Kerberos 4 and 5 principals look like. While the syntax is similar, there are some notable differences. We’ll take a look at the Kerberos 4 principal format first.
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