CNI Podcast: The MIT Kerberos Consortium

This thirteen minute podcast features an interview with Stephen C. Buckley, Executive Director and Tom Yu, Development Team Leader, both from the MIT Kerberos Consortium. It was recorded at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting. Kerberos is a computer authentican network protocol, which allows individuals communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. This open-source tool was awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

The MIT Kerberos Consortium was created to establish Kerberos as the universal authentication platform for the world's computer networks.

After many years of developing Kerberos internally at MIT, it has become clear that the needs and requirements of the wider Kerberos community exceed the ability of MIT to fund future Kerberos development. The success of Kerberos has caused it to grow far beyond the original user community and the original scope of MIT's own Kerberos efforts. Although MIT could continue to fund Kerberos development at a level that would meet its own needs, a wide variety of issues that are important to operating system vendors, application vendors, and end customers lie beyond what the Institute could reasonably afford on its own. However, recognizing the important role Kerberos plays both at MIT and the larger user community, MIT is prepared to continue its investment if others will join in and support a larger effort. This effort will continue to operate at MIT as the MIT Kerberos Consortium.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org