Kerberos cryptography secures NT 5 communications

One of the more eagerly awaited features on Windows NT 5 is a much stronger authentication method, called Kerberos.

It's been well documented that the default encryption used for NT 3.51 and 4.0 is quite weak and easily cracked but that it was necessary for backward-compatibility with LAN Manager, Windows for Workgroups and other early Microsoft networking implementations.

Kerberos was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specifically for Unix, but it has been ported to a number of other operating systems. The Kerberos protocol uses strong cryptography so that a client can prove its identity to a server (and vice versa) across an insecure network connection. After a client and server have used Kerberos to prove their identity, they can also encrypt all of their communications to ensure privacy and data integrity as they go about their business.

Kerberos is freely available from MIT as source code, and - surprise - there's already an NT version available. While this is intended for developers, it could give you an early start in getting ready for NT 5.

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