MIT Launching Kerberos Consortium

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.'"

Comments

Laughably outdated

[SuperBanana]

In celebration of this milestone they will also be launching a new consortium dedicated to preserving and evolving this standard for years to come.

That's a wonderful bit of spin.

My from-the-hip guess is that MIT has realized that they're a)dependent on Kerberos and b)nobody else uses it, so they need to generate some noise, make some unfounded claims, and hope to get some other people onboard. "Used in the enterprise"? Bullshit...

Kerberos was an idea for a time when nobody used SSL, nobody had SSH, VPNs were proprietary and could only be done on specialized hardware, and yp/nfs was still considered "acceptable."

Kerberos is an 8-track technology in a MP3 world where one can use an ssh client to proxy any SOCKS client, while mounting their home directory via SSHfs, while tunneling all their IP traffic (yep, latest openssh does full IP tunneling!)

I knew MIT had officially jumped the shark when I saw an alarm clock covered in shag rug with wheels touted as "brilliant", when it was something on the level of kitsch I'd expect from some no-name third-world electronics company.

Another great example of MIT's failure to generate students who have useful, applicable knowledge would be when their underwater robotics team, despite supposedly being the best+brightest, backed by sponsorship from the biggest defense contractors and oil companies...got their asses handed to them by a bunch of high school students from East Nowhere.