Kerberos

An authentication system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kerberos is designed to enable two parties to exchange private information across an otherwise open network. It works by assigning a unique key, called a ticket, to each user that logs on to the network. The ticket is then embedded in messages to identify the sender of the message.

Kerberos is the security system of MIT's Project Athena. It is based on symmetric key cryptography. See also: encryption.