MIT officially launches Kerberos Consortium

Although Kerberos is widely used by enterprises, the MIT Kerberos Consortium still thinks it has some new frontiers to conquer.

The consortium, which officially launched Thursday, was founded with “the ambitious mission to create a universal authentication platform to protect the world’s computer networks.” Kerberos is an open source security protocol developed at MIT in the 1980s that uses strong cryptography  to authenticate both users and servers.

Stephen Buckley, the consortium’s executive director, said the consortium wants to promote Kerberos use more widely for both consumers shopping through e-commerce, and for professionals who send sensitive information over mobile devices. If consumers and professionals adopt Kerberos as their standard security protocol for e-commerce and mobile communications, he says, then incidences of identity fraud and phishing could become a lot less common.

During the consortium’s launch event, Buckley made a case for promoting Kerberos as a tool for commercial and mobile use. If the members of the consortium did nothing to further advance and promote the Kerberos protocol, he said, then “the world’s methods for authenticating people would fracture” and “interoperability would become a thing of the past.”

“In technology, if something doesn’t grow, it dies,” he said. “If we don’t create solutions where people can securely use the Web for e-commerce and mobile devices, we’re sunk.”

Sam Hartman, the consortium’s chief technologist, outlined the consortium’s plans to promote Kerberos for more general use among consumers. Among other things, Hartman said that the consortium would have to work on making Kerberos more manageable for mobile devices that have smaller footprints and that have to wait longer for network traffic; on making sure that Kerberos works well with other security technologies, such as Security Assertion Markup Language; and on improving Kerberos’ appeal to product developers. Hartman also said that Kerberos’ mark of success will be when people use it seamlessly without even noticing it’s there.

“I always ask people if they’ve ever played a networked Xbox game, or ever logged into a Windows machine in a corporate environment,” Hartman said. “And their answer is very often yes, and I tell them that they’ve used Kerberos… when a computer security program works and there’s not an attack underway, you shouldn’t notice it.”

Many consortium officials and sponsors attending the launch praised Kerberos as an essential authentication protocol tool that has been key in keeping networks secure. The launch also featured a special, non-alcoholic “Kerberos toast” that commemorated the 20th anniversary of the protocol’s official launch.

“I jumped at the chance to be part of this new consortium,” said Bruce Vincent, the chief IT architect and technology strategist at Stanford University. “I represent throngs of folks back at Stanford and lot of other institutions that want to see the consortium succeed.”