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Kerberos: The Definitive Guide
by: Jason Garman

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.8
EAN: 9780596004033
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596004036
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 270
Publication Date: December 15, 2003
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Sales Rank: 223492
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Kerberos, the single sign-on authentication system originally developed at MIT, deserves its name. It's a faithful watchdog that keeps intruders out of your networks. But it has been equally fierce to system administrators, for whom the complexity of Kerberos is legendary.

Single sign-on is the holy grail of network administration, and Kerberos is the only game in town. Microsoft, by integrating Kerberos into Active Directory in Windows 2000 and 2003, has extended the reach of Kerberos to all networks large or small. Kerberos makes your network more secure and more convenient for users by providing a single authentication system that works across the entire network. One username; one password; one login is all you need.

Fortunately, help for administrators is on the way. 'Kerberos: The Definitive Guide' shows you how to implement Kerberos for secure authentication. In addition to covering the basic principles behind cryptographic authentication, it covers everything from basic installation to advanced topics like cross-realm authentication, defending against attacks on Kerberos, and troubleshooting.

In addition to covering Microsoft's Active Directory implementation, 'Kerberos: The Definitive Guide' covers both major implementations of Kerberos for Unix and Linux: MIT and Heimdal. It shows you how to set up Mac OS X as a Kerberos client. The book also covers both versions of the Kerberos protocol that are still in use: Kerberos 4 (now obsolete) and Kerberos 5, paying special attention to the integration between the different protocols, and between Unix and Windows implementations.

If you've been avoiding Kerberos because it's confusing and poorly documented, it's time toget on board! This book shows you how to put Kerberos authentication to work on your Windows and Unix systems.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Will Get You Up and Running (1stEd)
First I would like to justify my 5 star rating. This book helped me out of a nasty multi-homed host and DNS problem when no other source could. Without this book I would have been troubleshooting this issue for days. I feel the book has paid for itself.

However, I wouldn't consider this "The Definitive Guide." It lacks documentation on the krb5.conf configuration file. I found myself referencing the krb5.conf(5) man page for additional info. Also, the documentation that comes with Heimdal is a very good good source for configuration settings.

Another deficiency is the GSSAPI coverage. I did have some trouble setting up my GSSAPI aware SSH with Kerberos. I found myself digging through the ssh man pages and doing some trial and error. Chapter 7 discusses Kerberos enabled applications. SSH is covered there, but I felt the GSSAPI aspect was lacking. Although the author mentions that GSSAPI is ... Read More

Rating:

- Good Starting Point
This has very superb explanations about the Kerberos authentication concepts. As a Windows system administrator, this has helped me immensely in understanding what's under the hood of Active Directory.

In delving into Windows-Linux interoperability experiments, this book was invaluable in presenting different scenarios. I decided to be bold and try have Linux directly authenticate to Windows Server 2003 KDC using information from Chapter 8 "Advanced Topics". I was able to learn the concepts and get started, but I ran into problems:

First the example (page 179) for exporting keytabs doesn't work with Windows 2003, as you need to use "nt4domain\unixhost" for ktpass -mapuser option.

Secondly, there's no coverage on what to do with these keytab files on the Unix side. I found later (googling) that I needed to install them using the kutil command.

Thirdly, there ... Read More

Rating:

- Kerberos intimidates a lot of people, don't be one of them
I got started using Kerberos many moons ago, at my university. This is probably how many people got to know about it. While I didn't use it very much, it's there that I learned the basics and experimented a bit with Kerberos. Interest in it took off after Microsoft incorporated Kerberos authentication mechanisms into Windows 2000. Suddenly it wasn't such arcane knowledge.

Two open source Kerberos implementations exist, the MIT reference implementation, and the Heimdal Kerberos implementation. Even then, there are two main versions which you can find, Kerberos IV and Kerberos V. Kerberos IV went away for most environments with the passing of the Y2K mark, but some legacy apps need support. So, you still have to deal with it on occasion.

In writing Secure Architectures with OpenBSD, I got a lot more intimate with Kerberos, and even set up a decently sized realm in my house. Hence, I got to experience ... Read More

Rating:

- Reasonably thorough introduction and guide, but needs updated
Like most O'Reilly titles, this book covers the general topics one needs to be conversant in a given topic. Take what you read, do a few web searches, experiment with the technology, discuss the concepts with others - this book will give you a solid foundation to get started. Moreover, like other O'Reilly topics one can see errata, etc. on the O'Reilly website. This book easily meets the high expectations one has of a book from this publisher: conversational tone, lots of hands-on examples, and broad coverage of applications using this technology.

There are really two areas where this book falls short: 1) while broad and general concepts of Kerberos are discussed, when the examples roll out little effort is given to explain the reasons behind settings, configurations, etc., and 2) as with many technology-related books this book could already use an update. In terms of the former issue, I can see that it is difficult ... Read More

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