An Overview of the Kerberos Authentication Proto

In today's open networks, authentication is a fundamental building block for a secure network environment. By using strong cryptography, the Kerberos authentication protocol allows both client and server to provide identity to each other over an insecure network connection. Communications between client and server, using the Kerberos protocol, is encrypted to ensure privacy and data integrity. Due to the complexity of the Kerberos authentication protocol, this overview of its utilization characteristics will be very broad. This paper will expound on some of the benefits gained by using the Kerberos authentication protocol rather than the Windows NT LAN Manager protocol. An explanation will also be provided on how the Kerberos protocol works and how the utilization of this protocol can enable strong authentication for client/server applications.