Origins

• As MIT began using a computer network on campus, leaders saw a need to implement a security protocol for their new computers. This development effort, begun in 1983, was called Project Athena.
  
  

Assistance

• To help complete Project Athena, IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation gave MIT grants to fund the effort. Additionally, MIT obtained different operating systems to determine how to standardize the protocol.
  
  

Release

• MIT released Kerberos in 1987 as an open-source product, free to the public to download and modify as needed. In 1993, the Internet Engineering Task Force made Kerberos an IETF Standard, meaning it was fit for use by computers across the Internet.
  
  

MIT Kerberos Consortium

• In 2007, MIT founded the Kerberos Consortium to manage the protocol by working with the computer industry to better fund and further develop Kerberos.