What Authentic, UNAUTHENTIC and FORGED mean
When you receive a windowgram, the message is marked Authentic,
UNAUTHENTIC, or FORGED. These labels indicate the result of the
sender's or your own authentication.
To make a long story short, it is possible to fool your workstation and
make it believe you are somebody else. For this reason Project Athena has
developed a system called Kerberos. Kerberos is able to verify that you
are who you say you are, and not impersonating someone else. Zephyr uses
the Kerberos system to authenticate its users.
If you and the sender pass authentication, then the message is marked
"Authentic." If you OR the sender fails authentication, then the message
is marked "UNAUTHENTIC." This does not necessarily mean that something
bad is occurring. Any user can fail authentication if he loses his
'Kerberos tickets', or if his tickets expire (which they do after 10
hours). You can gain a new set of tickets at any time by running the
'renew' program. After typing 'renew', you will be prompted to enter your
password.
FORGED is a special case whereby *you* had valid Kerberos tickets, but the
information in the tickets did not match that of the original tickets used
by Zephyr. In an extreme case, it might indicate someone having tampered
with the Kerberos tickets, but most commonly, it occurs when you obtain
new tickets, and thus these tickets do not concur with those which Zephyr
is expecting. If this is the case, it can be fixed by:
zctl load
Zephyr will then receive the new tickets.
For more information on Kerberos, type "man kerberos" at your athena%
prompt.
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