The term Kerberos was
derived from the Greek mythology. Cerberus is the
latin variant of Kerberos, who guarded the entrance of Hades, the Greek
hell. The Kerberos security system, on the other hand, guards electronic
transmissions that are sent across a network.
Kerberos is a mature network authentication
protocol based on the RFC 1510
(The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5)) specification
of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is designed
to provide strong authentication for client or server applications
using the shared secret key cryptography.
The Kerberos server is based on a distributed client/server
architecture. It ensures secure communication in a networked environment
by leveraging individual trust relationships. It then brokers that
trust across enterprise wide, distributed client/server networks.
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