Limitations of the Kerberos authentication system

  • Authors:
  • S. M. Bellovin;M. Merritt

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

The Kerberos authentication system, a part of MIT's Project Athena, has been adopted by other organizations. Despite Kerberos's many strengths, it has a number of limitations and some weaknesses. Some are due to specifics of the MIT environment; others represent deficiencies in the protocol design. We discuss a number of such problems, and present solutions to some of them. We also demonstrate how special-purpose cryptographic hardware may be needed in some cases.