Kerberos is an authentication protocol that uses tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. It's like having a bouncer at a club who checks your ID before letting you in, except instead of a fake ID from your older brother, you have a cryptographically secure ticket from a trusted third party.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was trying to debug this issue with our Kerberos setup, but I kept getting lost in the acronyms. It's like trying to read a bowl of alphabet soup - KDC, TGT, TGS, AS, SPN... I think I need a decoder ring.

• Our new hire was struggling to understand Kerberos, so I told them to imagine it like a game of "Mother May I" - you have to ask permission from the Key Distribution Center before you can take any actions. Except instead of advancing 3 baby steps, you get a ticket to access network resources.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Preventing Key Theft at Passwords15: This paper by Martin Kleppmann and Conrad Irwin proposes a method to rate-limit password guesses on stolen key material, slowing down offline attacks and facilitating easy key revocation.

• How to do distributed locking: In this article, Martin Kleppmann critiques the Redlock algorithm, arguing that it is not safe enough for critical locking purposes and recommending alternatives like ZooKeeper for situations where correctness is crucial.

• Kerberos: The Network Authentication Protocol: The official MIT Kerberos website provides extensive documentation, guides, and resources for those looking to dive deep into the protocol.

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