We will achieve our goal of ubiquitous Kerberos deployment by completing approximately forty projects over a period of seven years

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Join The Kerberos Consortium

All of the organizations that are potential supporters of the Kerberos Consortium have a financial stake in finding a solution to the challenge of creating a single authentication and authorization system. The question is not “will you support the development of such a system?” but “which system will you support?” The answer will depend on how much time will be required to complete its development and implementation, and what the overall cost will be.

It is our belief that the most cost effective way to create such a system in the shortest amount of time at the least cost is by investing in the MIT Kerberos Consortium. There has already been a substantial investment made in the development and implementation of Kerberos. These organizations already deploy large-scale infrastructures using Kerberos to serve hundreds of thousands of end users.

Who are these organizations? They are operating system and application vendors, Internet-based providers of services, and large-scale institutional users, such as financial service institutions, universities, government laboratories, healthcare providers, and major industrial corporations to name a few.

Many organizations have already recognized the value of ongoing Kerberos development to their information technology infrastructure, and have contributed money to the existing Kerberos development efforts at MIT. The Consortium intends to make membership-based contributions a major source of ongoing funding.

The Consortium will achieve its goal of ubiquitous Kerberos deployment by completing approximately forty projects over a period of seven years. The Consortium staff will initially consist of the existing MIT Kerberos Development team and will expand to fifteen during the first three years. The estimated cost of implementing the vision of a universal authentication and authorization infrastructure scalable across federated and peer-to-peer environments is $21 million or $3 million annually. MIT will secure these funds primarily by soliciting contributions from corporations who desire to become members of the Kerberos Consortium in order to support this important work, and additionally receive benefits from their sponsorship.

If you would like to join the MIT Kerberos Consortium, please review the Costs and Benefits of joining the Kerberos Consortium, and MIT Consortium Agreement.

Please feel free to contact our Executive Director, Stephen C. Buckley with any questions (sbuckley@mit.edu)