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MIT Launching Kerberos Consortium

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the passing-the-torch dept.

alphadogg writes to tell us that next week MIT will be throwing a 20th birthday party for their Kerberos authentication system. In celebration of this milestone they will also be launching a new consortium dedicated to preserving and evolving this standard for years to come. "Kerberos, originally created for MIT's Project Athena, is used mainly by enterprises and MIT's goal is to see the IETF security standard develop into a universal system for single sign-on. [...] 'Kerberos has.... become successful beyond MIT's internal capacity to respond to the world's demands for development, testing and support. So we need a new organizational structure that can accommodate the demand.'"

4 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Someone has to ask it... by erroneus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...so why not me?

    Long ago, people were all upset when Microsoft did the ole embrace and extend thing with Kerberos. I haven't heard much about that for years. Has it been a problem for anyone? Will the Kerberos consortium take whatever Microsoft did into account so as not to break what other people have done to work with and around Microsoft?

    1. Re:Someone has to ask it... by mvdwege · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The Samba guys were able to figure out how to sign the PAC from the doc MS provided

      You mean the doc that came as a self-extracting archive that presented an EULA that looked suspiciously like an NDA? A license that was eventually dropped after much screaming from the rest of the computing world in the direction of Seattle?

      Mart
      --
      "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
  2. Re:And how wil MS influence this? by EvanED · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You do realize there's plenty of history you can look at for what they might do regarding kerberos, right? It's been there since Windows 2000.

    (Actually my OS prof last semester was one of the developers on the W2K kerberos stuff.)

  3. Kerberos Rocks my world! by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As I have demonstrated from some of my previous posts, Kerberos is indispensable in the network administration infrastructure in the Linux world, it connects to SSH, Samba, Apache, and god knows what else. Its something no Linux Admin should be without knowledge of. The MIT Kerberos implementation has been behind for years because of their refusal to implement LDAP support until now. I'm just glad Kerberos finally gets a standard LDAP Connector. I'm sick of having to maintain one database for Kerberos and LDAP for everything else.

    Still, Kerberos rocks my world. I couldn't do without it.