1. Introduction

This document describes the concepts and model upon which the Kerberos network authentication system is based. It also specifies Version 5 of the Kerberos protocol. The motivations, goals, assumptions, and rationale behind most design decisions are treated cursorily; they are more fully described in a paper available in IEEE communications [NT94] and earlier in the Kerberos portion of the Athena Technical Plan [MNSS87].

This document is not intended to describe Kerberos to the end user, system administrator, or application developer. Higher-level papers describing Version 5 of the Kerberos system [NT94] and documenting version 4 [SNS88] are available elsewhere.

The Kerberos model is based in part on Needham and Schroeder's trusted third-party authentication protocol [NS78] and on modifications suggested by Denning and Sacco [DS81]. The original design and implementation of Kerberos Versions 1 through 4 was the work of two former Project Athena staff members, Steve Miller of Digital Equipment Corporation and Clifford Neuman (now at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California), along with Jerome Saltzer, Technical Director of Project Athena, and Jeffrey Schiller, MIT Campus Network Manager. Many other members of Project Athena have also contributed to the work on Kerberos.

Version 5 of the Kerberos protocol (described in this document) has evolved because of new requirements and desires for features not available in Version 4. The design of Version 5 was led by Clifford Neuman and John Kohl with much input from the community. The development of the MIT reference implementation was led at MIT by John Kohl and Theodore Ts'o, with help and contributed code from many others. Since RFC 1510 was issued, many individuals have proposed extensions and revisions to the protocol. This document reflects some of these proposals. Where such changes involved significant effort, the document cites the contribution of the proposer.

Reference implementations of both Version 4 and Version 5 of Kerberos are publicly available, and commercial implementations have been developed and are widely used. Details on the differences between Versions 4 and 5 can be found in [KNT94].

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].