Security

Explain how the Kerberos authentication protocol works as a SSO solution

Difficulty: unrated

Source: bregman-arie/devops-exercises by Arie Bregman

Answer

Kerberos works as a SSO solution by only requiring the user to sign in using their credentials once within a specific validity time window. Kerberos authentication grants the user a Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) from a trusted authentication server which can then be used to request service tickets for accessing various services and resources. By passing around this encrypted TGT instead of credentials, the user does not need to sign-in multiple times for each resource that has been integrated with Kerberos.