Remarks prepared by Ted Ts'o, June 28, 2001
On behalf of the many people who worked on Kerberos through the years,
thank you.
I first got involved with Kerberos in 1987, when I worked at Project
Athena as a student systems programmer, otherwise known to most as a
"watchmaker". Over the years, it's been my privilege to watch
Kerberos grow and develop, and get used and adopted and adapted by
different projects and organizations. From other universities, to
national labs, to the Open Software Foundation, and most recently,
when Microsoft embraced and extended Kerberos and made it part of
Windows 2000. It's been a wild ride, and I feel very blessed to have
had the chance to been a part of this adventure.
The number of people who have worked on Kerberos through the years is
huge, and mentioning them all would take too long --- not to mention
impossible --- no doubt if I tried, I'd leave someone out.
But I would like to mention a number of people who were involved in
the earlier days of the MIT Kerberos implementation: Richard Basch,
Bill Bryant, Marc Colan, Don Davis, Mark Eichin, Dan Geer, Paul Hill,
Marc Horowitz, Barry Jaspan, John Kohl, Ken Raeburn, Jon Rochlis, Bill
Sommerfeld, Jenifer Steiner, and Ralph Swick.
I'd also like to thank collectively engineers from many companies and
organizations that have helped us over the years, by contributing
suggestions, bug fixes, and in some cases, significant pieces of code,
including Argonne National Laboratory, Cybersafe, Cygnus Support,
Digital, IBM, The Open Software Foundation, Open Vision, Microsoft,
Naval Research Laboratary, Sandia National Laboratory, Sun, Transarc,
and many, many, others.
And of course, we must acknowledge Jeff Schiller, Jerry Saltzer, and
Cliff Neumann, who were the original primary designers of the Kerberos
protocol, and Roger Needham and Michael Schroeder whose theoretical work
was the basis of Kerberos.
A lot of people were involved in making Kerberos possible. But of
course, that's true for any successful Open Source project. And with
any such project, perhaps the biggest thank you has to go to all of
the users of Kerberos. Thank you for your encouragement; thank you
for your enthusiasm; thank you for your support.
Dan Geer Gives Special Thanks To...
Jennifer Steiner,
who was Kerberos team lead, reporting to me, and who gave the
Feb 1988 maiden Kerberos talk at USENIX
Don Davis,
who created the user-to-user protocol with Ralph Swick and who
has been principle author on *4* Kerberos papers at USENIX
Ralph Swick,
who created the user-to-user protocol with Don Davis and heavily
influenced the role of Kerberos in X
Bill Bryant,
whose documentation and, especially, his four scene play explaining
Kerberos went a long way towards making Kerberos widely understood
Ken Raeburn,
who took over from Ted T'so and is, in fact, the head of Kerberos
development at MIT as of this writing
John Linn,
who drove the GSS-API formal standardization process for Kerberos
which, in turn, is what Kerberos centric design everywhere employs
Marc Horowitz,
whose prolific integration work and constant bug fixing has made
Kerberos pervasive
Barry Jaspan,
who managed to both build and then contribute to the community at
large the Kerberos adminstration server
Brian Tung,
who literally wrote the book (0-201-37924-4 Addison Wesley 05/99)
on Kerberos
Roger Needham & Mike Schroeder,
whose protocol was what we implemented to get Kerberos
Jerry Saltzer,
the faculty member in charge as well as former dissertation
supervisor to Schroeder
IBM and Digital,
for paying for the blamed thing
And all the people on MIT's team:
https://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/krbdev.html
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