Tim Springston: A while back I wrote a blog post regarding PAC (Privilege Attribute Certificate) validation in Microsoft Kerberos. We’ve had enough interest in this lately, particularly around the idea of disabling it, that it seemed like a good idea to post about this again and add some more detail.
The reason for the Shatneresque drama in the title is that there are times when you expect that the PAC validation disabling action should work to prevent PAC validation but it does not. If your environment is in a situation where disabling PAC validation is a priority then this can lead to some serious angst and maybe even some hair pulling if you see unexpected results.
As a recap, PAC validation takes place when an application which is trusted for delegation attempts to reuse a Kerberos ticket from an impersonated or delegated user which it has already locally cached. This action essentially initiated a quick check to make sure that the PAC-which contains the core information on who the user is and what privileges in the environment he or she has-hasn’t been tampered with.