This is a Commodity Jurisdiction Request for the bones of the Kerberos distribution. This "Bones" distribution has the encryption stripped out to make it exportable (we hope). A CJR is a formal request to the State Department for them to determine what kind of export license is required for this item. This request has been asigned case # 012-94. The State Department has 15 working days to tell us whether the Bones are officially exportable or not, and under what rules. I'll post the results when they come in. One of the games that the State Dept. and NSA play is to not reveal exactly what is exportable, so that people will err on the side of safety (and export fewer things with crypto in them). By sharing information among ourselves, we can find out what the real rules are. This CJR was made using Lee Tien's CJR kit, available for FTP on cygnus.com:/pub/export.cjr.kit. John Gilmore Cygnus Support John Gilmore Generalist Cygnus Support 1937 Landings Drive Mt. View, CA 94043 +1 415 903 1418 +1 415 903 0122 fax ATTN: Maj Gary Oncale - 15 Day CJ Request U.S. Department of State Office of Defense Trade Controls PM/DTC SA-6 Room 200 1701 N. Fort Myer Drive Arlington, VA 22209-3113 Fax +1 703 875 5845 ATTN: 15 Day CJ Request Coordinator National Security Agency P.O. Box 246 Annapolis Junction, MD 20701 Subject: Mass Market Software with Encryption - 15 Day Expedited Review Requested Subject: Commodity Jurisdiction Request for "Kerberos 900104 bones.tar.Z patchlevel 6" INTRODUCTION This is a Commodity Jurisdiction Request for mass market software with encryption capabilities. The name of the software product is "Kerberos 900104 bones.tar.Z patchlevel 6". We have no DTC registration code. We have reviewed and determined that the software, which is the subject of the CJ request, meets paragraph 1 of the "Criteria for Determining the Eligibility of A Mass Market Software Product for Expedited Handling." A duplicate copy of this CJR has been sent to the 15 Day CJ Request Coordinator. DESCRIPTION The software is an authentication system for networked computers. It is a component of the MIT Athena project, which built various software for automating the administration and operation of large networks of computers. The Kerberos software is undoubtedly familiar to your agency. We believe that previous CJR's have been made on it, including at least one from Digital Equipment Corporation. The Kerberos system authenticates individual users in a network environment. It bases security on a `secret' which is shared between a central Kerberos server and the user. This secret is a cryptographic key based on the user's password, with which the user can prove who they are by being able to decrypt sealed messages from the server. After the user has authenticated herself to Kerberos, she can use familiar Berkeley Unix network utilities such as rlogin, rcp, and rsh, without having to present passwords to remote hosts and without having to rely on insecure ``.rhosts'' files. These utilities will work without passwords only if the remote machine supports the Kerberos protocols. If not, the normal facilities will be used. Kerberos provides the following benefits: * Security against outside attackers. * Security against inside attackers. * Convenience in a distributed workstation environment. * Augmentation of an existing security organization. * Standardized access control mechanisms. I have enclosed a technical paper, "Kerberos: An Authentication Service for Open Network Systems", from the 1988 Winter USENIX Conference Proceedings. This "Bones" version of the Kerberos software has been specially prepared for export by removing the encryption routines and the calls to the encryption routines. We are submitting this CJ to confirm the the official opinion of the Department of State on whether we require a State Department and/or Commerce Department license to export this software. ORIGIN OF COMMODITY The item was originally designed for its current use. It was created as part of MIT's Project Athena in the 1980's. It was designed for commercial use without concern for military use. An example of its commercial use is in authenticating students who work from various workstations on a campus, connected via local-area and wide-area networks. The item was developed with private funding. The item is currently publicly available on the Internet via FTP (file transfer protocol) from the machine athena-dist.mit.edu (18.71.0.38) in directory /pub/kerberos/dist/900104/bones.tar.Z. Its documentation is available as /pub/kerberos/dist/900104/doc.tar.Z.aa and doc.tar.Z.ab. We obtained the item and documentation from that location. CURRENT USE The current use of this item is to provide user authentication for computer users in a network. The software provides: * a server which runs on a physically secured computer and which stores the password of each user * library routines which establish communication between the server and other programs * utility programs for administering the authentication system klist, kinit, kdestroy, ksu, ksrvtgt, kadmin, kprop * modified versions of readily available networking programs, which use the library routines for authentication, including: tftp - trivial file transfer protocol sample - a sample application knetd - user authentication daemon rsh and rshd - remote shell rlogin and rlogind - remote login rcp - remote file copy The uses of the item have not changed significantly over time. Most of the product market is commercial. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS There are no military standards or specifications that the item is designed to meet. There are no special characteristics of the item, including no radiation-hardening, no ballistic protection, no hard points, no TEMPEST capability, no thermal and no infrared signature reduction capability, no surveillance, and no intelligence gathering capability. The item does not use image intensification tubes. The item originally used encryption algorithms for authentication, using the DES (Data Encryption Standard), however these algorithms and the calls to them have been removed to facilitate export approval. OTHER INFORMATION We recommend that this item and its technical documentation be determined to be in the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department. We believe that it qualifies for the general license GTDA for General Technical Data to All Destinations, because it qualifies as "publicly available" and contains no encryption routines or hooks for encryption. ATTACHMENTS I have enclosed a technical paper, "Kerberos: An Authentication Service for Open Network Systems", from the 1988 Winter USENIX Conference Proceedings. I have also enclosed the README file from the MIT directory where we obtained the software, which describes what was done to the software to make it more suitable for export. If there are any technical questions, NSA has direct access to the full source code and online documentation via the Internet. The item is currently publicly available on the Internet via FTP (file transfer protocol) from the machine athena-dist.mit.edu (18.71.0.38) in directory /pub/kerberos/dist/900104/bones.tar.Z. Its documentation is available as /pub/kerberos/dist/900104/doc.tar.Z.aa and doc.tar.Z.ab. We obtained the item and documentation from that location. Sincerely, John Gilmore Generalist Cygnus Support -- John Gilmore gnu@toad.com -- gnu@cygnus.com -- gnu@eff.org ``This committee has not tried to determine whether the National Security Agency tendency to advance exaggerated claims of authority ... stems from conscious policy or the actions of individual NSA employees.'' The Government's Classification of Private Ideas, House Report 96-1540, p. 67