Summary
Kerberos' reliance on the Active Directory structures of Windows 2000 and XP shows scalability into the future operating systems that Microsoft and others create. There's much more to Kerberos, including the use of account databases that the KDC uses to obtain security profiles and is used as the primary reference point for creating definitions of objects. There is also support of the delegation of authentication, preauthentication, and the definition of credentials caching and DNS name resolution definitions. Given the fact that Kerberos is an open standard, there are sample applications available from MIT (see http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/) for testing and learning about the command syntax of this security protocol.