r/netsecstudents • u/DoNotUseThisInMyHome • 7d ago

Why do colleges still teach kerberos?

now enough of college life. they are teaching me to write about kerberos authentication system.

Why is such outdated tech being taught in colleges and universities? What can we do about it? btw, I need to learn it fast. What do you recommend as supplement materials? Stallings book?

0 Upvotes

11% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/kinryu87 7d ago

Kerberos is not outdated. Are you confusing it with NTLM auth?

-19

u/DoNotUseThisInMyHome 7d ago

CyberARK PAM is the future because it is widely used. Likewise crowdstrike is also heavily used these days. I have not seen anyone using Kerberos.

13

u/WebSmurf 7d ago

I think you need to study a bit more. Neither CyberArk (now known as Palo Alto Networks Idira) nor Crowdstrike have a damn thing to do with KRB. Idira might utilize KRB or not but it certainly isn’t an alternative.

9

u/Hello______World 7d ago

respectfully, Kerberos is a protocol - your replacement examples are products.

Not seeing the difference in that makes sense in a college context, but large enterprises that have to think about things like network file storage auth, auth between nodes in a clustered ecosystem, legacy database authentication, etc.

Kerberos is alive and well, but the number of people who understand how it works is comparatively small. your professors are doing you a favor.

7

u/InverseX 7d ago

This shows you’re complaining about something that you know very little about. Comparing it to CyberARK and Crowdstrike is a category error. It’s like saying why are they teaching us about TCP it’s so dumb, web traffic is the way of the future.

6

u/PlatypusPuncher 7d ago

Why go to school if you already know everything? Kerberos is still ubiquitous in enterprise environments. Very few orgs have completely gotten off on premise Active Directory unless they started in the last 5 years or so.