How Kerberos Authentication Works
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You may not know it, but your network is probably unsecured right now. Anyone with the right tools could capture, manipulate, and add data between the connections you maintain with the internet. The security cat and mouse game isn’t one sided, however. Network administrators are currently taking advantage of Kerberos to help combat security concerns.
Project Athena
Project Athena was initiated in 1983, when it was decided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that security in the TCP/IP model just wasn’t good enough. A total of 8 long years of research passed before Kerberos, named after the three-headed Greek mythological dog known as Cerberus, was officially complete.
The result of MIT’s famous research became widely used as default authentication methods in popular operating systems. If you are running Windows 2000 or later, you are indeed running Kerberos by default. Other operating systems such as the Mac OS X also carry the Kerberos protocol. Kerberos isn’t just limited to operating systems, however, since it is employed by many of Cisco’s routers and switches.



