Cross platform development tools company Cygnus Solutions Inc has announced what it claims is the industry’s first Kerberos implementation that fully supports Unix and Windows NT systems, and plans to give the source code away for free. Cygnus will distribute free binaries and sources of its KerbNet commercial implementation of MIT’s security software from its web site (www.cygnus. com), and allow modifications and re-distribution, in the hope that it will speed up the establishment of standards in the desktop market, and embedded computing products. As a result, Cygnus will cease to support KerbNet for new customers. The KerbNet product is designed to provide network security software for developers needing secure user authentication for new mobile computing products, and has been extended to make it easier to administer in enterprise-computing desktop systems, with full interoperability between Unix and NT, and links to Oracle database systems to store user profile information. Sunnyvale, California-based Cygnus has been working with Kerberos since the early 1990s, and numbers AT&T Co, Oracle Corp, Xerox Corp, UUNet Inc and NASA among its KerbNet users. Support for Kerberos received a major boost recently when Microsoft abandoned its own security scheme in favor of Kerberos for Windows NT version 5.0 (CI No 3,111).
