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Those who have some knowledge about the Computer Networks and Network Security, Kerberos might not be a new term. Kerberos Protocol is basically an authentication service which was originally worked out at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a part of Project Athena. Kerberos is the term derived somewhere from the Greek Mythology. Kerberos in Greek Mythology is a three headed dog and serpent tail who guard the entrance of Hades. The function of Kerberos in computer networks is analogous to that, authentication, accounting, and audit being its three heads. However the later two have not been implemented yet. Kerberos enable the servers in the distributed environment to restrict access to authorized users and to authenticate requests for service for the users at workstations. In distributed environment server can not always identify the users correctly as one may impersonate and gain access to the network. Moreover there is always the risk of Eavesdropping which can result in allowing the unauthorized user to gain the access the services restricted otherwise. That is why Kerberos came to existence as it provides a centralized authentication server that uses Symmetric Encryption techniques to authenticate the users to servers as well as server to users.

Kerberos have 5 known Versions of which first three versions were the just the development versions. Kerberos Version 4 was implemented as the original Kerberos. However Kerberos Version 5 has also evolved which corrects some pitfalls of the previous version. You should refer to RFC 1510 for detailed description of the versions of Kerberos.

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