# 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 was presented at the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2005. The slides can be found on the workshop website and here.

The work on Network Identity Manager was supported by MIT Information Services and Technology, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Secure Endpoints Inc..

### Design

A plugin 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 plugin to be maintained within the OpenAFS code base and separates the code supporting Kerberos 5 and Kerberos 4. Furthermore, it is anticipated that this would encourage third party developers to develop plugins for NetIDMgr.

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