Kerberos and Active Directory
If you have been researching Active Directory (AD), chances are that you will come across the concept of Kerberos for user authentication and other service request-related functionalities. It is worthwhile to examine the Kerberos protocol in depth and, in turn, appreciate the dependency of AD on Kerberos. Given that Kerberos is an industry standard, you will see that it has become the most widely used network authentication protocol for all Windows environments with operating systems 2000 and later.