Commercial products exist for this purpose, such as Power Broker: https://www.beyondtrust.com/products/powerbroker-identity-services-ad-bridge/ https://www.bey

Commercial products exist for this purpose, such as Power Broker: https://www.beyondtrust.com/products/powerbroker-identity-services-ad-bridge/ https://www.beyondtrust.com/products/powerbroker-identity-se... In addition, it's involved but possible for an experienced user to set up AD authentication on Linux. All AD really amounts to is a database; the endpoint (computer, server, whatever) performs a query, AD produces a response. That can be as a simple as 'is this username/password combination valid?' to 'where in the domain does this computer fit and what rights does it have?' AD allows for other nice features like Group Policy enforcing consistent configuration on every desktop. It also implements Kerberos-based authentication for better security. Ergo, the only security issue I can foresee is that the query is done over unsecured means; AD uses LDAP as its primary protocol, which in its native form is plaintext. So your computer could conceivably send plaintext login information over the wire. However, most sysadmins will disable this and only support LDAP over SSL (LDAPS) which is encrypted. Most Linux LDAP implementations support running it over SSL. A second concern is that the Linux machine does not implement Kerberos, and instead uses the fallback to NTLM authentication; if this is the case, your sysadmins should have disabled it. Kerberos is supported on Linux, and is a bit more involved when joining a machine manually, but has equivalent security to Windows. A Linux machine joined to AD is no less secure than a Windows machine, and can in theory be more secure, since Linux has traditionally had much more strict separation of privileges, preventing ordinary users from making system-wide changes. On the other hand, other aspects of Windows security, especially in a network sense, don't translate especially well to Linux (e.g. Access Control Lists). This won't reduce security, in fact will more likely enforce it, but may make it inconvenient for the end user to work around some of these differences. In short, there is no practical security risk in running a Linux machine on a Windows domain. Many sysadmins will push back on the idea mostly out of lack of experience with Linux, or the perception that they will need to support it. Obviously each organisation has their own policies, but from a security POV, there is no identifiable risk.