![](//pubimage.360doc.com/wz/default.gif) We‘ve all heard a lot of buzz about Kerberos Security in Windows 2000. Well what is it? The name "Kerberos" comes from a mythological three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades. Invented by MIT, this form of security has been evolving in the Unix world for over a decade and is now becoming a standard. Many assume that a firewall makes them safe from attacks, however, statistics show that a large number of attacks happen from within a firewall. Kerberos security also addresses this issue in the same way that it prevents outside attacks. The way that this is accomplished is that passwords are not sent over the network in clear text making them unavailable to most sniffers and hacker tools.
The current version, Kerberos version 5, has been published by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as RFC 1510
What Does Kerberos Do? The Kerberos security system protects electronic transmissions that get sent across the network. It does this by scrambling the information so that only the computer that‘s supposed to receive the information can unscramble it. In addition, it makes sure that your password never gets sent across the network, only a scrambled "key" to your password. Kerberos is necessary because there are people who know how to tap into the lines between the computers and listen out for passwords. They do this with programs called "sniffers". |