Microsoft Ditches NTLM for Kerberos, Free Windows 10 Upgrades Over

Microsoft plans to phase out the NT LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication protocol in Windows 11 and focus on strengthening the Kerberos authentication protocol for improved security. New features in Windows 11 include Initial and Pass Through Authentication Using Kerberos (IAKerb) and a local Key Distribution Center (KDC) for Kerberos. NTLM, introduced in the 1990s, has been supplanted by Kerberos since Windows 2000 but continues to be used as a fallback mechanism. NTLM has inherent security weaknesses and is vulnerable to relay attacks, prompting Microsoft to encourage the use of Kerberos instead.