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KAMU: providing advanced user privacy in Kerberos multi-domain scenarios

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Abstract

In Next Generation Networks, Kerberos is becoming a key component to support authentication and key distribution for Internet application services. However, for this purpose, Kerberos needs to rectify certain deficiencies, especially in the area of privacy, which allow an eavesdropper to obtain information of the services users are accessing. This paper presents a comprehensive privacy framework that guarantees user anonymity, service access unlinkability and message exchange unlinkability in Kerberos both in single-domain and multi-domain scenarios. This proposal is based on different extensibility mechanisms already defined for Kerberos, which facilitate its adoption in already deployed systems. Apart from evaluating our proposal in terms of performance to prove its lightweight nature, we demonstrate its capability to work in perfect harmony with a widely used anonymous communication system like Tor.

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Notes

  1. Kerberos User Anonymity and Message Exchange Unlinkability.

  2. In this paper, we use the terms realm/domain and user/client indistinctly.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain, under Grant TIN2011-27543-C03 by the European Seventh Framework Program through the INTER-TRUST project (contract 317731) and by the “Seneca Foundation for Excellent Group in the Region 04552/GERM/06”. Also, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have significantly contributed to improve the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications Engineering (DIIC), Faculty of Computer Science, University of Murcia, 30100 , Espinardo, Murcia, Spain

    F. Pereñíguez-García, R. Marín-López, A. Ruiz-Martínez & A. F. Skarmeta-Gómez

  2. Laboratory of Information and Communication Systems Security, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of Aegean, Samos, 83200, Greece

    G. Kambourakis & S. Gritzalis

Authors
  1. F. Pereñíguez-García
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  2. R. Marín-López
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  3. G. Kambourakis
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  4. A. Ruiz-Martínez
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  5. S. Gritzalis
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  6. A. F. Skarmeta-Gómez
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Correspondence to F. Pereñíguez-García.

Appendix: Performance analysis detailed results

Appendix: Performance analysis detailed results

To simplify the performance analysis conducted in Sect. 5.2, numerical results are displayed through different plots. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, in the following, we provide the detailed measurements taken for the different metrics used as reference: message length, network time, message processing time and exchange time. Tables 3, 4 and 5 contain results obtained in the single-domain scenario for standard Kerberos, PrivaKERB (level 2) and KAMU, respectively. Similarly, Tables 6, 7 and 8 show values collected in the multi-domain scenario for these schemes.

Table 3 Results for standard Kerberos in single-domain scenario
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Table 4 Results for PrivaKERB (level 2) in single-domain scenario
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Table 5 Results for KAMU in single-domain scenario
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Table 6 Results for standard Kerberos in multi-domain scenario
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Table 7 Results for PrivaKERB (level 2) in multi-domain scenario
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Table 8 Results for KAMU in Multi-Domain Scenario
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Pereñíguez-García, F., Marín-López, R., Kambourakis, G. et al. KAMU: providing advanced user privacy in Kerberos multi-domain scenarios. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 12, 505–525 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-013-0201-1

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