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authorRuss Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>2007-03-08 23:58:28 +0000
committerRuss Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>2007-03-08 23:58:28 +0000
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- Wallet Implementation Notes
-
-Introduction
-
- Collected here are implementation notes about design decisions,
- external interfaces, integration, internal structure, and related
- issues. This document will mostly be of interest to people who want
- to modify the wallet code or who are curious about its design. This
- is not user documentation or protocol specifications; see elsewhere
- for that.
-
-Server Issues
-
- Interface
-
- We need two interfaces for retrieving items, one which retrieves the
- current stored item and one which generates a new item. This
- particularly applies to keytabs. We also don't want new keytabs to be
- generated for certain keys even by accident without an explicit action
- taken, but for most keytabs we want to generate new keys each time.
- So we need an interface like:
-
- get keytab
-
- Generates a new keytab normally, but retrieves the existing keytab
- if we've marked the key as unchanging.
-
- flag unchanging
- flag -unchanging
-
- Change the state to generate new keytabs each time or always try to
- pull the existing key. This operation should probably be
- privileged.
-
- So if you want to generate a new key for a keytab that would otherwise
- be persistant, mark it changing, download the new key, and then mark
- it unchanging again.
-
- Possibly need to do something about occasionally changing keys of
- keytabs that are otherwise marked unchanging, or we're going to open
- ourselves to brute force attacks.
-
- ACL Management
-
- Supported operations are: get, store, create (triggered by a get or
- store of something that didn't already exist), delete, show, and
- setting or clearing flags. Each of these need a separate ACL
- potentially. Not sure if we're going to need separate ACLs for each
- flag operation.
-
- Administrators get implicit access to do anything. There does need to
- be an ACL on create, but that should probably be implemented per
- backend class (keytabs and certs will use NetDB roles, files will use
- some namespace limitation based on a separate table, etc.). There may
- also need to be a class-specific fallback when no ACL is set to deal
- with, for instance, ACL management via NetDB roles for systems that
- have no more specific ACL.
-
- Owner rights provides get, store, and show, but not delete or setting
- or clearing flags (not delete because it's too destructive and we
- don't want it done accidentally). This can be overridden by more
- precise ACL settings. So the ACL logic would go like this:
-
- * If the user is an administrator, operation is permitted.
-
- * Otherwise, check the object. If it exists and has a setting for
- that specific ACL, apply that ACL.
-
- * If the object exists but with no specific ACL setting and the
- operation is one of get, store, or show, apply the owner ACL.
-
- * If there is no listed owner ACL, punt to the backend and see if it
- can apply a default ACL.
-
- * If the object doesn't exist, punt to the backend, which will do its
- own ACL check against backend-specific rules.
-
- I think the owner abstraction is worth it over just setting the ACL
- for get, store, and show.
-
- We also need to provide an interface to manage certain types of ACLs,
- in particular the krb5-group ACL scheme, at least in the short term
- until we standardize on using LDAP for all of those ACLs. We're
- probably going to continue to use krb5-group ACLs for the forseeable
- future in at least some cases, since we'll want to be able to do
- things when LDAP or AFS is down or we'll want a higher level of
- security than either can ensure.
-
- Flags
-
- locked -- No operations permitted except show
- unchanging -- Pull existing value from file store
-
- For backends like secure files, all values are unchanging implicitly,
- but I don't think we should represent this by setting flags on every
- instance of those backends; it's just confusing and doesn't provide
- more information.
-
- Expiration
-
- The database has a field to store an expiration date for every object.
- We can implement expiration methods in the backend to automatically
- delete some objects (or perhaps lock them) when they pass their
- expiration date, but a more useful method might be to provide warnings
- when objects are about to expire via warning methods for a backend
- that take the object name and the expiration date. This would be
- great for certificates, for instance.
-
- Keytab Backend
-
- As of the deployment of the wallet, we want to stop limiting nearly
- all keytabs from being forced to single DES keys. We're probably
- still going to have some keys for which only particular enctypes are
- permitted, however. This means keeping a side table of allowable
- enctypes per keytab name, where if there are no entries in the table
- we allow any enctype. We can pass a list of enctypes into kadmin when
- doing the principal creation or randomization, separated by spaces and
- enclosed in double quotes.
-
- When creating a new principal with addprinc, pass the -clearpolicy
- flag. Otherwise, the principal will be placed in the default policy
- and will be subject to password strength checking, and the initial
- password used with -randkey will fail.
-
- Whenever we generate a new keytab, we may need to push the key into
- K4. We could make the client send a flag saying whether they want
- synchronization with K4, but it's easier to just always do it (except
- maybe for some exception cases). The user doesn't have to ask the
- client program for the srvtab if they don't want it, and it doesn't
- hurt to create the KDC entry.
-
- This means that we need the gen_srvtab program from the old srvtab
- backend on the server end to push the key into K4. That program
- already has the capability to take a srvtab containing the DES key and
- push it into the K4 database. It could probably stand some cleanup
- and simplification for inclusion in the wallet source. I'm probably
- going to rename it to k4changekey or something similar in the process.
-
- Certificate Creation
-
- We probably want to handle all requested certificates from Comodo
- using this interface since we can use its expiration handling to do
- warnings and since that way users can re-download the certificate any
- time they want. Certificates are actually pairs of certificate and
- key, though, and we need to figure out what we're storing. There is
- the key, which we want to be able to store but we don't really do
- anything with (except ideally it's associated with a certificate),
- there's the CSR (which we could reuse for renewals although that
- doesn't get people to change their key), and there's the certificate
- itself (which is actually public data). Should there be some method
- for someone to request that their previous CSR be reused to request a
- new Comodo certificate? Maybe more work than needed.
-
- Cleanup of Old Entries
-
- We should periodically scan the wallet for host-based entries for hosts
- that aren't in NetDB. Rather than removing them immediately, wait
- until we haven't seen the host for several consecutive passes and then
- purge them. Send notification of the hosts that are being purged (and
- maybe of the hosts that will be purged soon if nothing happens).
-
-Client Issues
-
- Command-Line Options
-
- Some of the specific data types are going to need their own flags to
- operations like get. As an example, the keytab get operation will
- need an optional flag to specify the srvtab file to which to also
- write the key, and will need an optional flag specifying the time
- delta at which old kvnos should be pruned from the keytab. These
- flags need to be globally unique in the wallet client so that we can
- use a naive option parser, although at least for starters we'll
- probably require that all the options be given after the operation.
-
- Keytab Handling
-
- The server is going to hand the client a keytab that contains the
- current keys for the given service. Unless the keytab was marked as
- unchanging, these entries will have a higher kvno than any keys
- already in the keytab on the local system.
-
- The only interfaces to read keytabs require a file, so the client will
- need to save the keytab to a temporary file in order to extract
- individual keys. If there is no keytab on the local system in the
- path given to the wallet, this is simple; just write the keytab as
- returned by the server into the file.
-
- If the keytab already exists, we want the following behavior:
-
- * Add the keys from the new keytab.
-
- * Retain in the keytab keys for the previous kvno, but not for any
- older kvno older than the maximum lifetime of Kerberos tickets. So
- scan the keytab for keys with an older kvno and a timestamp older
- than one day (maybe make it a week just in case) and delete them.
- (Possibly make this configurable.)
-
- * Delete any keys in the keytab matching the current kvno, just to be
- sure we don't get any strange issues.
-
- We want to try to add the new keys first to minimize the outage window
- where service tickets handed out by the KDC aren't recognized by the
- host. Adding the keys does just append them to the end, but we
- probably have to clean out any keys with the same kvno first. That's
- a rare case, so I don't think we have to worry about the outage window
- there.
-
- Srvtab Handling
-
- If a srvtab was requested, we search for the key in the new keytab
- that has an enctype of ENCTYPE_DES_CBC_CRC and then write it out to a
- srvtab file. The MIT Kerberos library doesn't support writable
- srvtabs in the keytab backend, so we roll that ourselves.
-
- Look at src/lib/krb5/keytab/kt_srvtab.c in the MIT Kerberos source for
- the format of a srvtab file (see the end of that file).
-
- The kvno that we get from K5 may have no bearing on the kvno in K4.
- In order to get the K4 kvno, use the new key to obtain a K4 service
- ticket for ourselves and then read the kvno off that service ticket.
- There are other approaches, but the other approaches all require
- changes to the server side as well, whereas this is self-contained in
- the client and can be more easily dropped when we drop K4.