Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

Summary

In this chapter, I discussed how Windows 2000 authenticates users and what the NTLM protocol is and how it works. You learned that NTLM was retained by Microsoft to provide backward compatibility with older legacy systems such as Windows 95 and Windows NT. (It's amazing how we might consider NT a legacy system already, isn't it?)

The key benefit to using NTLM is backward compatibility with Windows 95/98 and NT.I also discussed how you improve security by implementing the more robust version of NTLM called Version 2. This version uses 128 bits to create the challenge and it is a lot harder to crack.

Finally, I discussed how certificates provide extremely secure authentication.

The next logical step in a successful Windows 2000 implementation ...