Kerberos - Significance to desktop users?

Ranguvar13 · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2008 Posts: 18 Location: Upstate NY

I'm hearing a lot about Kerberos. Unfortunately, most of the information online about it is from the perspective of server admins. I'm just a desktop power user. I do like being secure, but I don't run a server or anything. What I do do is ssh into my PC every once in a while, sometimes from outside my home network.

My question is, would Kerberos be relevant to me? I don't want to go through a ton of pain to get a little extra security, but if Kerberos fixes a reasonably large gap in OpenSSH security, and isn't a ton of trouble to use, I'd like to.

Also, I see there's something called LDAP... is it the same type of system (not sure what word to use) Kerberos is? Does it suit me any better?

You can probably see, I'm pretty lost. I'm really not big into networking at all, and security not as much as I should be. I just want to ssh with peace of mind.

Thanks!

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

ssh definitely does the right job for you.
kerberos is a ticket granting service that enables one to log into machines (note, plural) with one ticket. you don't need that.
ldap is a directory service that carries lists of users, groups, etc. you don't need that.
read the wikipedia articles, i think that should explain the rest.

Ranguvar13 · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2008 Posts: 18 Location: Upstate NY

Thanks very much!

b0b0 · n00b Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Posts: 43

I am also a desktop user and am currently doing a massive package update. I notice that kerberos has been included in "system" with OpenSSH-5 and a few other packages building against it. Why was this done?

Edit: It looks like kerberos was keyworded in profiles/default-linux/amd64/2007.0/desktop. Is there any particular reason why this was added to desktop?

manaka · Apprentice Joined: 23 Jul 2007 Posts: 178 Location: Spain

SSH is secure. But if you really want peace of mind, you should check key fingerprints to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2008 7:53 pm Post subject:

b0b0,

Kerbos was recently removed from the 2008.0/desktop profile.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.