1KERBEROS(8)               BSD System Manager's Manual              KERBEROS(8)
2

NAME

4     kerberos — introduction to the Kerberos system
5

DESCRIPTION

7     Kerberos is a network authentication system. Its purpose is to securely
8     authenticate users and services in an insecure network environment.
9
10     This is done with a Kerberos server acting as a trusted third party,
11     keeping a database with secret keys for all users and services (collec‐
12     tively called principals).
13
14     Each principal belongs to exactly one realm, which is the administrative
15     domain in Kerberos. A realm usually corresponds to an organisation, and
16     the realm should normally be derived from that organisation's domain
17     name. A realm is served by one or more Kerberos servers.
18
19     The authentication process involves exchange of ‘tickets’ and
20     ‘authenticators’ which together prove the principal's identity.
21
22     When you login to the Kerberos system, either through the normal system
23     login or with the kinit(1) program, you acquire a ticket granting ticket
24     which allows you to get new tickets for other services, such as telnet or
25     ftp, without giving your password.
26
27     For more information on how Kerberos works, and other general Kerberos
28     questions see the Kerberos FAQ at
29           http://www.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/krb/kerberos-faq.html.
30
31     For setup instructions see the Heimdal Texinfo manual.
32

SEE ALSO

34     ftp(1), kdestroy(1), kinit(1), klist(1), kpasswd(1), telnet(1), krb5(3),
35     krb5.conf(5), kadmin(1), kdc(8), ktutil(1)
36

HISTORY

38     The Kerberos authentication system was developed in the late 1980's as
39     part of the Athena Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
40     Versions one through three never reached outside MIT, but version 4 was
41     (and still is) quite popular, especially in the academic community, but
42     is also used in commercial products like the AFS filesystem.
43
44     The problems with version 4 are that it has many limitations, the code
45     was not too well written (since it had been developed over a long time),
46     and it has a number of known security problems. To resolve many of these
47     issues work on version five started, and resulted in IETF RFC 1510 in
48     1993. IETF RFC 1510 was obsoleted in 2005 with IETF RFC 4120, also known
49     as Kerberos clarifications. With the arrival of IETF RFC 4120, the work
50     on adding extensibility and internationalization have started (Kerberos
51     extensions), and a new RFC will hopefully appear soon.
52
53     This manual page is part of the Heimdal Kerberos 5 distribution, which
54     has been in development at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stock‐
55     holm, Sweden, since about 1997.
56
57HEIMDAL                          Jun 27, 2013                          HEIMDAL
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