Free annual MIT security conference expands beyond Kerberos

The annual MIT-hosted conference devoted to the Kerberos network authentication protocol now has a broader mission.

The newly named MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust Conference will be held on Oct. 7 at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., from 9am-6pm, with a social event following. The theme will be: Personal Data & The Internet.

[FROM THE ARCHIVES (2007):Behind the scenes of MIT's network]

According to Thomas Hardjono, technical lead and executive director for what's now called the MIT Consortium for Kerberos and Internet Trust (it launched in 2007 as the MIT Kerberos Consortium), "The mission of the consortium has been expanded as we see many of our members have interests beyond just Kerberos.  MIT will still continue developing the open source Kerberos software, but in addition we want to develop open source software to address the members' other interests (e.g., identity & access control management, federation, consent management, scalable authorization, etc.). We see these as 'components' that can build towards a personal data service/system, which interestingly has parallel applicability in the Enterprise."

The consortium's expanded mission includes being a forum for uniting IT pros from enterprises such as Fidelity and Morgan Stanley with technical experts from vendors like Microsoft and Red Hat and institutions such as MIT and Brown University.

In addition to the conference, a Kerberos Protocol interoperability and testing event will take place at MIT on Oct. 8-9.

Registration for the conference is free, though non-members of the consortium are asked to contact Hardjono before filling out the registration form: mailto:hardjono@mit.edu

Here's a slide deck to catch you up on Kerberos and the Consortium's efforts.

Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook page, as well on Twitter and Google +. 

Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.