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jha

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 4, 2021
271
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Picked up a new '14 MBP today and see "Kerberos" in notification settings. Don't see it on any other macs running the latest version of Monterey. Any idea what this is?

Screen Shot 2021-10-31 at 4.17.41 PM.png
 
I've got it on my M1 MBA running Monterey 12.0.1. I understand what Kerberos is but why is it in Notifications? And what does it notify us about? I'm leaving it on out of curiosity. Is it a developer option to provide user notifications for apps that use it?
 
I've got it on my M1 MBA running Monterey 12.0.1. I understand what Kerberos is but why is it in Notifications? And what does it notify us about? I'm leaving it on out of curiosity. Is it a developer option to provide user notifications for apps that use it?
I would like to know as well.
 
I would have suspected that this would only appear if your organization has installed the Kerberos SSO extension on your computer. But I just looked at my personal computer (no MDM) and it has it as well. I wonder if this is just a bug and it should be hidden when the SSO extension is not installed.
 
I would have suspected that this would only appear if your organization has installed the Kerberos SSO extension on your computer. But I just looked at my personal computer (no MDM) and it has it as well. I wonder if this is just a bug and it should be hidden when the SSO extension is not installed.
am wondering that too, and whether it might disappear in an OS update. or not.
 
Kerberos is a secure authentication protocol. For a general description see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_(protocol). It was developed at MIT and is still actively developed - see: https://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/. It is the default authentication mechanism on Windows (since Windows 2000 and Active Directory).

The Apple document on Kerberos as single sign on extension is here: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/site/Kerberos_Single_Sign_on_Extension_User_Guide.pdf. But kerberos use is a bit wider than this. For macOS, it is involved in screen sharing and, I expect, other places where secure authentication is required.

If you look at your open network ports, you will see port 88 is open for connections by the kdc (key distribution centre) process.

Kerberos has always been installed as part of OS X and macOS. Don't attempt to disable.

[This duplicate of post I have put in the other thread]
 
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I disabled all notifications for Kerberos.

I read almost anything I could find on Google and roughly know what Kerberos is, but still hardly know what these notifications are for. (It's strange that Apple leaves it to the user to configure this without providing any information.)

Here is what I found out or assume:
- In the CoreServices folder there's an app called Ticket Viewer which is related to Kerberos. (Many, many years ago, this app was actually called "Kerberos".) The notifications are not for this app. Kerberos might be some kind of system service that runs in the background.
- I've been a Mac user for a long time and don't think that I've ever received a notification with the word "Kerberos" in it. I'm also pretty sure that I've never received a notification that was somehow related to Kerberos.
- These notifications are probably irrelevant for 99.9% of Mac users.

I'm still curious, though, what these notifications are for. If anyone has ever received a notification from Kerberos or something that might be a notification from Kerberos, it would be cool if he|she could post it here.
 
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