Kerberos is an authentication mechanism of clients or servers over secured network. It provides authentication without transferring the password over the network. It works by using time-sensitive tickets that are generated using symmetric key cryptography.
It was chosen over the most-widely-used SSL-based authentication. Kerberos has the following advantages:
- Better performance: Kerberos uses symmetric key operations. This helps in faster authentication, which is different from SSL key-based authentication.
- Easy integration with Enterprise Identity Server: Kerberos is one of the established authentication mechanisms. Identity servers such as Active Directory have support for Kerberos. In this way, services such as Kafka can be easily integrated with centralized authentication servers.
- Simpler user management: Creating, deleting, and updating users...
