Comment by Nextgrid

3 years ago

> Kerberos relies on line of sight to the TGS

Isn't this the same with any SSO provider? The SSO provider must be reachable by the end-user's browser during any authentication operation.

(in case of KB it must be reachable by the target services too, but in a server-to-server environment it's less of an issue)

> Golden Ticket

Isn't this exactly the same to let's say a session cookie of a web-based IdP?

The IdP could apply policies on its backend that bind the cookie to a given IP address, user-agent or other indicators, but can't this also be done for Kerberos tickets using a server-side middleware on every service you wish to access (since KB is internal-only, it shouldn't be that big of a deal)?

> Isn't this the same with any SSO provider?

Yes, but OAuth has one major upside: HTTPS only.

No one wants to create site-to-site VPN networks to flow Kerberos.

  • Isn't Kerberos explicitly designed to run over untrusted networks and not require any additional transport encryption?

    You could argue that the common implementations are large piles of legacy C with questionable memory safety that could open them to exploitation by malicious actors, but that's an implementation detail rather than the protocol itself - and I believe there's at least one (mostly?) memory-safe implementation in Java called Apache Kerby.