Protocol

The Kerberos protocol began as the network authentication protocol for MIT's Project Athena in the 1980s. The current version of the protocol is version 5. Version 4 of the Kerberos protocol was the first version that was publicly released, and is now deprecated for security reasons.

Version 5 of the Kerberos protocol became a Proposed Standard in the IETF with the publication of RFC 1510 in 1993. In 2005, RFC 4120 became the current Proposed Standard specification of the Kerberos protocol.

Software

The MIT Kerberos software first became available to the public around 1989 (protocol version 4). In 1996, krb5-1.0 became available to the public (protocol version 5).

Organization

The MIT Kerberos software began development as part of MIT's Project Athena. After the formal end of Project Athena, MIT Information Systems took over development and maintenance of the MIT Kerberos software. In 2007, MIT launched the MIT Kerberos Consortium as a means of engaging external sponsors for funding and collaboration. The scope of the Consortium later expanded to include other network identity related technologies. With this scope change, the Consortium became known as the MIT Consortium for Kerberos and Internet Trust. In 2015, John Charles (MIT Vice President of Information Systems & Technology) and Professor Alex Pentland announced that Kerberos development would return to being an internally funded open source project, while research in Internet Trust would move to the new MIT Internet Trust Consortium.