From the FAQ

From the FAQ

"What's with the name? Isn't it rather odd to name a security and identity project bandit?
Yeah, it's a little odd. We prefer to think of it as edgy. We were looking for a name that followed some general principles of Open Source project names: short, memorable, good logo possibilities, easy to to spell, not directly related to project content, etc., and had settled somewhat on a dog theme. There's the common joke that, on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog. Kerberos is an evil, three headed dog and we also deal with authentication but wanted a more friendly family-pet kind of dog. And "dog tags" are for identification. After numerous attempts we settled on the common dog name of Bandit. We also like the notion of the mask because it reminds us of a persona or role, but that's probably a stretch. "

I sort of hope that negative connotations of banditry don't provide a bad spin to the effort.
Now, if they wanted to play off of the mythological Kerberos in an interesting way, they could license Cerebus from Dave Sim.