kerberos
11 posts tagged kerberos.
-
Five Ways Windows Authentication Breaks: A Machine-Checked Tour -- and Why Finding Nothing New Is the Point
A Tamarin and Dolev-Yao tour of 23 Windows authentication protocols: five recurring failure patterns, what a prover can prove, and the boundary it cannot cross.
-
Pass-the-Hash to Pass-the-PRT: Twenty-Nine Years of Windows Credential Replay in One Family Tree
Pass-the-Hash, Pass-the-Ticket, Overpass-the-Hash, Pass-the-Certificate, and Pass-the-PRT are one architectural lineage. Each defense bought years; none closed the family.
-
Microsoft Defender for Identity: The Defensive AD Stack That Sees What BloodHound Maps
A field guide to Microsoft Defender for Identity, the on-DC sensor and cloud analytics engine descended from Aorato, that fires named alerts on almost every offensive AD primitive in the corpus -- and the five structural blind spots it cannot close.
-
The Card That Wasn't a Card: How Windows Authentication Outgrew the Smart Card Metaphor
Smart cards, virtual smart cards, and Windows authentication 1996-2026: from PC/SC and PIV through the 2014 NTLM-secondary defect to WHfB and FIDO2.
-
Agentic Identity on Windows: When the Process Acting on Your Behalf Isn't You
Every AI agent on Windows in 2026 runs as the logged-on user. The cloud-identity layer has crossed the agent-attribution gap; the OS layer has not. This article maps the FIDO AATWG pillars onto Windows primitives and asks what is missing.
-
Certified Pre-Owned: AD CS and Active Directory's Second Trust Root
AD CS ESC1-ESC16: how Microsoft shipped Certificate Services in 2000, what SpecterOps named in 2021, and why the catalog grows faster than the patches.
-
KRBTGT: The Account That Owns Active Directory
Active Directory ships with one cryptographic key whose disclosure forges valid TGTs for every principal -- and why rotating it is necessary but not sufficient.
-
Who is allowed to log in where? The KDC-side answer to credential theft in Active Directory
A 28-year arc from Paul Ashton's pass-the-hash demonstration to the 2026 reference deployment of Tiering, Protected Users, and Authentication Policy Silos.
-
Two Checkmarks and the Keys to the Kingdom: How Active Directory's Replication Protocol Became the Longest-Lived Credential Attack on Windows
MS-DRSR was designed for domain controllers to replicate secrets to each other. Its access check gates on an ACL, not on whether the caller is a DC. Eleven years after Mimikatz proved it, no patch can fix it.
-
Kerberos in Windows: The Other Half of NTLMless
After NTLM, Kerberos becomes the load-bearing authentication protocol for Windows. Eight years of attacks, the December 2025 Beyond-RC4 cadence, and the H2 2026 IAKerb / Local KDC broad enable.
-
NTLMless: The Death of NTLM in Windows
Thirty years of pass-the-hash, NTLM relay, PetitPotam, and ESC8 -- and the Kerberos engineering that finally lets Microsoft turn NTLM off by default.