An optimized Kerberos authentication protocol
Eman El-Emam, Magdy Koutb, Hamdy M. Kelash, Osama Farag Allah · 2009
This paper will introduce simple modifications to the database of the widely deployed Kerberos authentication protocol. The principle's long-term secret key will be independent of the user password with the aim to overcome the weak passwords chosen by the network principal that are susceptible to password guessing attacks, the main drawback of the Kerberos protocol. Instead, the Kerberos Distribution Center will save a profile for every instance in the realm that it mange and the secret key will be generated based on that profile. This profile will be hashed and then, the output digest will be encrypted to generate the secret key. Besides, the lifetime of the secret key will be controlled using the system lifetime. We will use Triple-Des as an encryption algorithm, SHA-256 as a hashing algorithm, and Blum Blum Shub as a random number generator algorithm.