Providing Kerberos Authentication Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

KERBEROS is a key distribution and user authentication service developed at MIT. Kerberos can be described as a trusted third-party authentication system. After a user authenticates with Kerberos, their communications can be encrypted to assure privacy and data integrity. The public key based protocols PKINIT, PKCROSS and PKTAPP help in implementing public key cryptography in different stages of Kerberos framework. The PKINIT extension provides a method for integrating public key cryptography into the initial authentication exchange, by using asymmetric-key encryption algorithm in pre authentication data fields. PKCROSS has been proposed to simplify the administrative burden of maintaining cross realm keys so that it improves the scalability of Kerberos in large multi realm networks. Finally PKTAPP has been proposed to improve the scalability of PKCROSS. The aim of this project is to study the implementation of these Kerberos protocols through a real time application system. In this paper we report how Elliptic curve cryptography provides a strong security by using smaller key size, as well as decreases the memory size and CPU time as compared to other algorithms.