MIT Kerberos Consortium welcomes Microsoft as a founding sponsor

By Janine de Blois

Slava Kavsan, Director of Development for Windows Core Security at Microsoft, will take a seat on the Executive Board, joining Jordan Hubbard from Apple, Paul Armstrong from Google, Wyllys Ingersoll from Sun, and Wilson D’Souza from MIT.

Launched in September 2007, the Kerberos Consortium includes a number of universities, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the US Department of Defense. The above are all founding sponsors.

Kerberos, originally developed for MIT’s Athena in the 1980s, has grown to be the most widely deployed system for authentication and authorization in modern computer networks.

It is currently mostly used for large enterprise networks. Kerberos security is used with all major operating systems.

Microsoft uses Kerberos protocol inWindows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2003, and also as the primary authentication in Microsoft Active Directory.

It has come a long way since the US and European anti-trust trials back in 2000 when they were accused of adding extensions to Kerberos in Windows 2000 creating a system that blocked users from using anything but Microsoft servers.

Interoperability is an important aspect of todays communication infrastructure. “Microsoft joining the Kerberos Consortium is significant,” said Stephen C. Buckley, Executive Director.

“They represent a vast number of users of Kerberos. It is an important step forward towards our common ambition to create a universal authentication platform for the world’s computer networks.”