One of the major goals of the MIT Kerberos Consortium is to establish Kerberos as a ubiquitous authentication mechanism on the Internet and also to make Kerberos appropriate for new environments. One of the key efforts within the MIT Kerberos Consortium directed at this goal is the Kerberos-on-the-Web (Kerb-Web) project.

The Kerberos-on-the-web project seeks initially to investigate the various aspects of the development and deployment of Kerberos within the Web space. This includes, among others:

a) the use of the Kerberos authentication paradigm within the context of web-authentication and web-services security,

b) the possible architecture integration and interactions between the Kerberos infrastructure and web-services security infrastructure,

c) the possible enhancements of the Kerberos authentication protocol and Kerberos token in order to address the requirements for Single-Sign-On (SSO) on the Web and Web Identity Federation, and

d) the potential re-use of existing Kerberos infrastructure investments in enterprises and other organizations to support the deployment of Kerberos-on-the-Web solutions.

In order to provide a starting point and context for discussions going forward regarding Kerberos-on-the-web, the MIT Kerberos Consortium has issued a new publication entitled “Towards Kerberizing Web Identity and Services”. This publication can be found in the following location:

http://kerberos.org/software/kerbweb.pdf

Labels: kerberos, security