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Kerberos has certain limitations that should be kept in mind when
designing security measures:
- Kerberos does not address ``Denial of service'' attacks. There are
places in these protocols where an intruder can prevent an application
from participating in the proper authentication steps. Detection and
solution of such attacks (some of which can appear to be not-uncommon
``normal'' failure modes for the system) is usually best left to
the human administrators and users.
- Principals must keep their secret keys secret. If an intruder somehow
steals a principal's key, it will be able to masquerade as that
principal or impersonate any server to the legitimate principal.
- ``Password guessing'' attacks are not solved by Kerberos. If a user
chooses a poor password, it is possible for an attacker to
successfully mount an offline dictionary attack by repeatedly
attempting to decrypt, with successive entries from a dictionary,
messages obtained which are encrypted under a key derived from the
user's password.
Next: Glossary of terms
Up: Kerberos Basics
Previous: The purpose of Realms
Contents
Index
Autobuild
2009-09-05