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Kerberos Authentication in Windows 2000

Kerberos Authentication in Windows 2000 (PDF, 1.76MB)Published: 27 Jul, 2001
Created by
Vishwas Gadgil

Microsoft's newest operating system Windows 2000 uses a publicly available protocol definition for authentication. The protocol used is Kerberos. This paper attempts to explain the Kerberos based authentication in Windows 2000 and also tries to explain the new and sometimes confusing terminology in a layman's words. It first discusses the limitations of traditional Windows NT style authentication. Then it shows how Kerberos implementation in Windows 2000 attempts to overcome most of those limitations. This paper also presents a much-detailed analysis of the exact steps