Yet Another useful paper

Win Treese treese at athena.mit.edu
Sun Jan 8 17:52:19 AEST 1989


In article <920 at acer.stl.stc.co.uk> "David Wright" <dww at stl.stc.co.uk> writes:
>In article <276 at gloom.UUCP> cory at gloom.UUCP (Cory Kempf) writes:
>#In article <13022 at bellcore.bellcore.com> karn at ka9q.bellcore.com (Phil Karn) writes:
>#> The answer to that problem is a good
>#>authentication scheme that would allow you to give your password only once
>#>(when logging in to your "home" computer) which would then enable your
>#>system to authenticate you to the other systems you use regularly on the
>#>network. 
>#
>#Let's see if I have this right... you are going to allow the
>#workstation that is sitting on my desk to convince another system that
>#I am me, right?
>#This workstation that will then lie for me if I ask it to? and tell
>#your system that I am you?  Or just about anybody else?
>#Really?
>
>Yes, of course.   Why not?   Not without some help, and not with current 
>standard UNIX and rsh/rlogin/etc. programs, but it is possible.

[...authentication scheme description deleted...]

See Steiner, Neuman, and Schiller, "Kerberos: An Authentication System
for Open Network Systems," USENIX, Winter 1988, Dallas, TX.

Kerberos is very similar to the scheme Mr. Wright described, and it has
been running at MIT for a few years now.  More information can be obtained
by writing to info-kerberos at athena.mit.edu.

BTW, the basic scheme Kerberos uses was described in a *1978* paper by
Needham and Schroeder, which appeared in CACM.

	Win Treese
	Digital Equipment Corp.
	Cambridge Research Lab
	treese at crl.dec.com



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