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MIT Forms Kerberos Consortium

MIT last week launched the Kerberos Consortium, according to a report from the university's News Office. MIT is the originator of Kerberos, a network authentication protocol. One of the goals of the consortium is to expand it to offer data protection to a wider range of clients, including various consumer devices.

Founding sponsors of the consortium include Centrify Corp., the Financial Services Technology Consortium, Google, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, TeamF1, and the University of Michigan. The group will also receive support from Apple.

"By establishing the Kerberos Consortium, MIT seeks to permit Kerberos to continue to grow and develop as a stable and universal 'single sign-on' mechanism for the users of modern computer networks," said Stephen Buckley, who's heading up the consortium as executive director, in a statement released by MIT. "The Consortium will provide a mechanism to permit greater industry participation in the funding and development of Kerberos, and thus allow it to evolve into the universal 'single sign-on mechanism' users need but do not yet have."

The group said it foresees Kerberos becoming "as ubiquitous as TCP/IP-based networking itself" in order to protect businesses and consumers from everything from data breaches to phishing.

To this end, the group plans to "implement the solutions it promotes in the form of open source reference implementations that can be used by Consortium members within their products and organizations without licensing fees," according to MIT.

About the Author

Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters.