The Kerberos protocol is designed to provide reliable authentication over open and insecure networks where communications between the hosts belonging to it may be intercepted. Kerberos was created by MIT as a solution to these network security problems. In summary, Kerberos is an authentication protocol for trusted hosts on untrusted networks.
Kerberos uses as its basis the symmetric Needham-Schroeder protocol. It makes use of a trusted third party, termed a key distribution center (KDC), which consists of two logically separate parts: an Authentication Server (AS) and a Ticket Granting Server (TGS). Kerberos works on the basis of "tickets" which serve to prove the identity of users. The KDC maintains a database of secret keys; each entity on the network — whether a client or a server — shares a secret key known only to itself and to the KDC. Knowledge of this key serves to prove an entity's identity. For communication between two entities, the KDC generates a session key which they can use to secure their interactions. The security of the protocol relies heavily on participants maintaining loosely synchronized time and on short-lived assertions of authenticity called Kerberos tickets.
- AS_REQ is the initial user authentication request (i.e. made with kinit) This message is directed to the KDC component known as Authentication Server (AS);
- AS_REP is the reply of the Authentication Server to the previous request. Basically it contains the TGT (encrypted using the TGS secret key) and the session key (encrypted using the secret key of the requesting user);
- TGS_REQ is the request from the client to the Ticket Granting Server (TGS) for a service ticket. This packet includes the TGT obtained from the previous message and an authenticator generated by the client and encrypted with the session key;
- TGS_REP is the reply of the Ticket Granting Server to the previous request. Located inside is the requested service ticket (encrypted with the secret key of the service) and a service session key generated by TGS and encrypted using the previous session key generated by the AS;
- AP_REQ is the request that the client sends to an application server to access a service. The components are the service ticket obtained from TGS with the previous reply and an authenticator again generated by the client, but this time encrypted using the service session key (generated by TGS);
- AP_REP is the reply that the application server gives to the client to prove it really is the server the client is expecting. This packet is not always requested. The client requests the server for it only when mutual authentication is necessary.