Explain the function and working model of Kerberos with the help of a diagram.

Kerberos: Kerberos is a commonly used authentication scheme on the Internet. Developed by MIT’s Project Athena, Kerberos is named after the three-headed dog who, according to Greek mythology, guards the entrance of Hades (rather than the exit, for some reason!). Kerberos employs a client/server architecture and provides user-to-server authentication rather than host-to-host authentication. In this model, security and authentication will be based on a secret key technology where every host on the network has its own secret key. It would clearly be unmanageable if every host had to know the keys of all other hosts so, a secure, trusted host somewhere on the network, known as a Key Distribution Centre (KDC), knows the keys of all the hosts (or at least some of the hosts within a portion of the network, called a realm). In this way, Ignou Study Helper www.ignousite.blogspot.com when a new node is brought online, only the KDC and the new node need to be configured with the node’s key; keys can be distributed physically or by some other secure means.

How Kerberos Works

Kerberos is an authentication protocol which uses a shared secret and a trusted third party arbitrator in order to validate the identity of clients. In Kerberos, clients may be users, servers, or pieces of software. 

The trusted third party arbitrator is a server known as a Key Distribution Center (KDC) which runs the Kerberos daemons. The shared secret is the users password transformed into a cryptographic key. In the case of servers or software systems, a random key is generated.

In Kerberos, users are known as principals. The KDC has a database of principals and their secret keys which is uses to perform authentication. In Kerberos knowledge of the secret key is considered sufficient for proof of identity. Since knowledge of a secret key translates into proof of identity in Kerberos, the Kerberos server can be trusted to authenticate any client to any other client. Authentication is Kerberos is done with out sending any clear text passwords across the wire. Below I'll explain how the Kerberos protocol maps to the GNU/Linux Kerberos software.

The KDC runs two important Kerberos daemons. These daemons are kadmind and krb5kdc. While GNU/Linux daemon naming conventions suggests that processes which have names starting with "k" are Kernel related or Kernel space processes, this is not true in the case of krb5kdc and kadmind. These two daemons are run as root in user space.

kadmind is the administrative daemon for the Kerberos server. kadmind is used by a program named kadmin to maintain the database of principals and policy configuration. If you choose to disallow any remote logins via ssh on your Kerberos hardware, kadmin will allow you to remotely administer the Kerberos components of the server.

krb5kdc is the workhorse of the Kerberos server. It is responsible for performing the role of the trusted third party arbitrator in Kerberos authentication. When a user wants to authenticate himself to a system or service, the user requests a ticket from the KDC. A ticket is a datagram consisting of the client's identity, a session key, a timestamp, and some other information. The datagram is encrypted with the server's secret key.

In detail that process works as follows, first the request for authentication is sent to the krb5kdc daemon. When the daemon received this request, it looks up the client, the principal, trying to authenticate in the principal database. It reads the clients secret key from this database and encrypts a special ticket called a Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) which it then sends back the client. The client receives this encrypted TGT which contains a session key. If the client knows the password (the secret key stored in the principal database) and can successfully decrypt the TGT, it can present the ticket encrypted with the enclosed session key to a Ticket Granting Service (TGS). The TGS will then issue a subsequent ticket which will provide the client with the authentication they need to use a specific system or service.

Through the use of encrypted tickets which can only be decrypted if the client knows the secret key, secure authentication takes place. Time stamp information is included in the tickets to prevent replay attacks. A replay attack would be the fraudulent representation of a previously issued ticket in order to gain unauthorized access.

Download Solution

Ignou MCA Solved Question Paper