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

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.