title: Kerberos, delegation and how to do this correctly?
body: <p>I've got two separate homemade applications that need to communicate among themselves. One is a frontend application (asp.net actually), the other is a backend interface to an accounting application. The backend interface was not created specifically for this frontend - it is a generic interface that many other applications use to integrate with our product.</p>
  
  <p>For the convenience of users we wish to provide a Windows Authentication in our frontend application. That means however that we need to pass the credentials on to the backend application which has to check them.</p>
  
  <p>We do not wish to set up our frontend as a "trusted" application to the backend which can authenticate itself as any user. If the frontend was to be hacked, it would then also compromise the backend system.</p>
  
  <p>As I understand it, one way to do it with Windows Authentication is Kerberos Delegation. However this requires to be explicitly enabled for the user that is to be delegated, and the machine which does the delegation (the server with our frontend). By default these options are disabled in Active Directory, and I suspect that many sysadmins will have their reservations about turning them on for all their users.</p>
  
  <p>Also, I'm not really sure that this is what Kerberos Delegation was meant for. I don't need our frontend to impersonate the user that is connecting. I just need to prove that this user has authenticated itself to me.</p>
  
  <p>How would you do this?</p>