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Kerberos Plus RSA for World Wide Web Security


Don Davis
Independent Consultant

Abstract

We show how to use Kerberos to enable its clients to interact securely with non-Kerberized World Wide Web servers. That is, our protocol does not require that the Web server be a member of a Kerberos realm, and also does not rely on time-synchronization between the participants. In our protocol, the Kerberos client uses the Web server's public-key certificate to gain cryptographic credentials that conform to public-key authentication standards, and to SHTTP. The client does not perform any public-key encryptions. Further, the client is well-protected from a man-in-the-middle attack that weakens SSL. Our protocol conforms to the current specifications for the Kerberos protocol and for the Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol.


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