Cloudera Administration Handbook

Introducing Kerberos

Kerberos is a network authentication protocol that has been designed to provide a robust authentication solution by employing secret key cryptography. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has implemented a free version of this protocol, which is widely used.

Kerberos addresses the following requirements:

• Kerberos makes it easy for users to log on and use the different resources on a network without having to go through the login procedure for access to each resource or service. In other words, Kerberos supports single sign-on access that would expect the user to log in only once into the system with seamless authorization to access the rest of the resources.
• Distributed systems involve a large number of nodes connected ...