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Kerberos vouching hinges on "ticket-granting server says...", and you know that because the tgt shares a secret with every player. On the face of it, it'd be much easier to just demand everyone know the tgt's public key (no need for N keys on the tgt for N participants).

I've long considered the merits of a kerberos-like system built on top of something like nacl... But without out-of-the-box support from all kinds of systems... It'd essentially build down to ssh+certificates with expiration dates... So i've gathered "better CA for ssh" is the better product. And there are thankfully a couple of projects in that vein (teleport, netflix/bless, others?).

[ed: i should add: I think tptacek is absolutely right about public key systems being easier to get wrong; but part of that is also the problem domain: look at the history of security issues with Kerberos (both implementations and protocol evolution) for a great example. On the face of it NxN key exchange is "text book simple; should be easy to define, a little tricky to scale". Then there's replay, clock drift, (de)serialisation, nounces, large number of session keys (secure random numbers)...]




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