Stolen from /mit/ghudson/info/athena Many Athena services use a security system called Kerberos. Kerberos can be thought of as a service for negotiating shared secrets between unfamiliar parties. A central server called a KDC (Key Distribution Center) has a pre-shared secret with each user and with each service. The secrets shared with users are conventionally called "passwords"; the secrets shared with services are conventionally called "keytabs" (or "srvtabs", in older jargon). Together, users and services are called "principals". When one principal requests to negotiate a shared key with another principal, the KDC makes up a random new key (called a "session key"), encrypts it once in each principal's key (along with a bunch of other information), and sends both pieces of ciphertext back to the first principal, which will in turn send the appropriate part to the second principal when it is ready to talk. Since both principals can get at the session key by decrypting their bit of ciphertext, they now have a shared secret which they can use to communicate securely. Kerberos clients record these bits of information in "credential caches" (or "ticket files" in older jargon; neither term is particularly correct since the file is not strictly a cache and stores more than just tickets). There are two versions of the Kerberos protocol in use on Athena, 4 and 5. The Kerberos 5 protocol supports more features and different types of cryptographic algorithms, but is also a great deal more complicated. See http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www for more complete and precise information about Kerberos. Athena services which use Kerberos include AFS, discuss, zephyr, olc, moira, and remote login and FTP (when both parties support it).