Deep Dive into Enterprise IT
This article explains how two most common authentication mechanisms (NTLM and Kerberos) work. Both authentication protocols are based on symmetric key cryptography. The protocols themselves are platform independent. NTLM Authentication NTLM is the default authentication protocol prior to Windows 2000 and still prevalent today as backup to Kerberos. It is based on challenge/response mechanism. User … Read moreNTLM and Kerberos protocols
This article gives a very brief high-level introduction to PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) and SSPI (Security Support Provider Interface) as authentication frameworks in Linux and Windows respectively. PAM The Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) architecture provides a powerful abstraction for user IAM using pluggable authentication model Unix platforms. It defines a generic API for authentication and … Read moreIntroduction to Authentication Frameworks (PAM and SSPI)
Introduction Authentication is used in many protocols (such as LDAP binding) and it usually involves sending password. Given the nature of authentication protocol, its traffic encryption is usually mandatory. Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) is introduced to ensure the security during authentication. It is not a single protocol, but rather a framework for authentication … Read moreSASL Authentication Mechanisms