Publications Details

Design of Kerberos modifications to FTP and TELNET

Brown, C.D.

Kerberos is a network user authentication system that was recently developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It has been adopted by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, for use in the Secure Supercomputing Network (SSN) which is currently under development. FTP and TELNET are two of the most important network applications for the SSN, which is to use the TCP/IP protocol suite. FTP provides capabilities for bulk file transfer between nodes and TELNET provides a remote interactive login capability across the network. This design describes how authentication is currently performed in FTP and TELNET using clear text passwords and proposes a method for modifying them to use Kerberos authentication.