Smart Cards and the Kerberos Protocol
Smart cards are typically deployed as part of a Public Key Infrastructure. When a new user is enabled, a public key pair is generated for the user, the public key is signed by the certificate authority, and the resulting key pair and certificate are placed onto the smart card’s memory. The smart card is then issued to the user.
When the user uses a smart card to authenticate to a Kerberos realm, he inserts the smart card into the smart card reader connected to his computer. The computer prompts the user for a PIN, which is then sent to the smart card. The PIN unlocks the portion of the memory that houses the user’s public key pair, to lessen the damage if the smart card is lost or stolen. Once the card has been unlocked in this way, PKINIT is used to obtain initial tickets for the user. The only difference is that the actual decryption of the initial AS response from the KDC is performed on the smart card itself, so that the public key pair is never directly accessible to the host computer.
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