The integrated Kerberos Adapter provides a seamless SSO experience for Windows clients by authenticating SSO requests using the Kerberos v5 protocol against Active Directory (AD) domains.

When the PingFederate IdP server receives an authentication request for SP-initiated SSO or a user clicks a hyperlink for IdP-initiated SSO, PingFederate invokes the Kerberos Adapter and returns to the browser an HTTP 401 Unauthorized response. When PingFederate receives a Kerberos ticket from the browser, it validates the ticket against the domain defined in the Kerberos Adapter configuration. If validation succeeds, PingFederate retrieves the username, the domain, and the security identifiers (SIDs) from the ticket, generates a SAML assertion with the username (and optionally the associated domain, SIDs, or both), and passes it to the SP.

Note:

The Kerberos Adapter supports authentications by Kerberos only. If your environment requires NTLM support, you must deploy the IWA Integration Kit. You can safely deploy the IWA Adapter and create one or more instances of it alongside with the Kerberos Adapter.