# About Network Identity Manager

This is strictly an informative page about the origins of Network Identity Manager.

### In the beginning

Network Identity Manager was conceived as an identity management solution to make up for the shortcomings of Leash32 (distributed with MIT Kerberos for Windows) and AFSCreds (distributed with OpenAFS).

The work started as Unified Credentials Manager, a final project for the MIT course 6.831 : User Interface Design and Implementation, taught by Professor Rob Miller. By the time actual code was written, it was named Khimaira (which was later changed to Network Identity Manager around October, 2005). Traces of the name Khimaira might still exist in the source code.

Khimaira: A Unified Interface for AFS and Kerberos was presented at the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2005.

A second talk, Developing plug-ins for Network Identity Manager, was presented at AFS and Kerberos Best Practice Workshop 2006.

The development of Network Identity Manager has been financially supported (in alphabetical order) by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, MIT Information Services and Technology, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Secure Endpoints Inc., and Stanford University.

### Design

A plug-in based architecture was chosen so that support for additional credential types and features could be added without making changes to the mainline code. In addition to making the application easily extensible, this also allows the AFS plug-in to be maintained within the OpenAFS code base and separates the code supporting Kerberos v5 and Kerberos v4 permitting Kerberos v4 to be easily removed from the Kerberos for Windows distribution. Furthermore, it is anticipated that this would encourage third party developers to develop plug-ins for Network Identity Manager. As of September 2007, a Kerberized Certificate Authority credential provider and a Grid credential provider are available from third parties.

More information about the concepts used in the design of Network Identity Manager can be found here.