2.3. Renewable tickets

Applications may desire to hold tickets which can be valid for long periods of time. However, this can expose their credentials to potential theft for equally long periods, and those stolen credentials would be valid until the expiration time of the ticket(s). Simply using shortlived tickets and obtaining new ones periodically would require the client to have long-term access to its secret key, an even greater risk. Renewable tickets can be used to mitigate the consequences of theft. Renewable tickets have two "expiration times": the first is when the current instance of the ticket expires, and the second is the latest permissible value for an individual expiration time. An application client must periodically (i.e., before it expires) present a renewable ticket to the KDC, with the RENEW option set in the KDC request. The KDC will issue a new ticket with a new session key and a later expiration time. All other fields of the ticket are left unmodified by the renewal process. When the latest permissible expiration time arrives, the ticket expires permanently. At each renewal, the KDC may consult a hot-list to determine if the ticket had been reported stolen since its last renewal; it will refuse to renew such stolen tickets, and thus the usable lifetime of stolen tickets is reduced.

The RENEWABLE flag in a ticket is normally only interpreted by the ticket-granting service (discussed below in section 3.3). It can usually be ignored by application servers. However, some particularly careful application servers may wish to disallow renewable tickets.

If a renewable ticket is not renewed by its expiration time, the KDC will not renew the ticket. The RENEWABLE flag is reset by default, but a client may request it be set by setting the RENEWABLE option in the KRB_AS_REQ message. If it is set, then the renew-till field in the ticket contains the time after which the ticket may not be renewed.