1 Heimdal is a free implementation of Kerberos 5.
3 Kerberos is a system for authenticating users and services on a network.
4 It is built upon the assumption that the network is "unsafe". Kerberos
5 is a trusted third-party service. That means that there is a third
6 party (the Kerberos server) that is trusted by all the entities on the
7 network (users and services, usually called "principals"). All
8 principals share a secret password (or key) with the Kerberos server and
9 this enables principals to verify that the messages from the Kerberos
10 server are authentic. Thus trusting the Kerberos server, users and
11 services can authenticate each other.