path: root/README

                            wallet release 0.2
                     (secure data management system)

                Written by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

  Copyright 2006, 2007 Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University.
  This software is distributed under a BSD-style license.  Please see the
  file LICENSE in the distribution for more information.

  This software is alpha-quality, and this release is intended as a
  technology preview and API preview.  This code has never been deployed
  in a production environment and considerable work remains before it will
  be ready.  See the file TODO in the distribution for the list of work
  that remains.

BLURB

  The wallet is a system for managing secure data, authorization rules to
  retrieve or change that data, and audit rules for documenting actions
  taken on that data.  Objects of various types may be stored in the
  wallet or generated on request and retrieved by authorized users.  The
  wallet tracks ACLs, metadata, and trace information.  It is built on top
  of the remctl protocol and uses Kerberos GSS-API authentication.  One of
  the object types it supports is Kerberos keytabs, making it suitable as
  a user-accessible front-end to Kerberos kadmind with richer ACL and
  metadata operations.

DESCRIPTION

  The wallet is a client/server system using a central server with a
  supporting database and a stand-alone client that can be widely
  distributed to users.  The server runs on a secure host with access to a
  local database; tracks object metadata such as ACLs, attributes,
  history, expiration, and ownership; and has the necessary access
  privileges to create wallet-managed objects in external systems (such as
  Kerberos service principals).  The client uses the remctl protocol to
  send commands to the server, store and retrieve objects, and query
  object metadata.  The same client can be used for both regular user
  operations and wallet administrative actions.

  All wallet actions are controlled by a fine-grained set of ACLs.  Each
  object has an owner ACL and optional get, store, show, destroy, and
  flags ACLs that control more specific actions.  A global administrative
  ACL controls access to administrative actions.  An ACL consists of zero
  or more entries, each of which is a generic scheme and identifier pair,
  allowing the ACL system to be extended to use any existing authorization
  infrastructure.  Currently, the only ACL type supported matches a single
  Kerberos principal name, but this will be extended in future releases.

  Currently, the only object type supported is a Kerberos keytab.  By
  default, whenever a Kerberos keytab object is retrieved from the wallet,
  the key is changed in the Kerberos KDC and the wallet returns a keytab
  for the new key.  However, also included in the wallet distribution is a
  script that can be run via remctl on the Kerberos KDC to extract the
  existing key for a principal, and the wallet system will use that
  interface to retrieve the current key if the unchanging flag is set on a
  Kerberos keytab object.

  The Kerberos keytab object implementation also optionally supports
  synchronization of keys with an AFS kaserver to aid in migration from
  Kerberos v4 to Kerberos v5.  Included in the wallet distribution is the
  kasetkey client, which can create, change the keys of, and delete
  principals from an AFS kaserver, authenticating from a srvtab.  It is a
  partial replacement for kas or a Kerberos v4 kadmin.

REQUIREMENTS

  The wallet client is written in C and builds against the C remctl
  libraries.  You will have to install the remctl client libraries in
  order to build it.  remctl can be obtained from:

      http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/remctl/

  The wallet client currently requires MIT Kerberos and will need some
  minor portability modifications to build with Heimdal.

  The kasetkey program requires AFS libraries and MIT Kerberos and its
  Kerberos v4 compatibility libraries.  Currently, kasetkey is built
  unconditionally.  It will become optional and disabled by default in a
  future release.

  The wallet server is written in Perl and requires Perl 5.6.0 or later.
  It uses the Perl DBI layer to talk to a database, and therefore the DBI
  module and a DBD module for the database it will use must be installed.
  Currently, the server has only been tested against SQLite 3 and will
  probably not work fully with other database backends.  It will be ported
  to and tested with MySQL for a later release.

  The wallet server is intended to be run under remctld and use remctld to
  do authentication.  It can be ported to any other front-end, but doing
  so will require writing a new version of server/wallet-backend that
  translates the actions in that protocol into calls to the Wallet::Server
  Perl object.

  The keytab support in the wallet server requires the kadmin client
  program be installed and currently assumes that it follows the syntax of
  the MIT Kerberos kadmin client.  It also requires that the wallet server
  have a keytab for a principal with appropriate access to create, modify,
  and delete principals from the KDC (as configured in kadm5.acl on an MIT
  Kerberos KDC).

  To support the unchanging flag on keytab objects, the Net::Remctl Perl
  module (shipped with remctl) must be installed on the server and the
  keytab-backend script must be runnable via remctl on the KDC.  This
  script also requires an MIT Kerberos kadmin.local binary that supports
  the -norandkey option to ktadd.  This option will be included in MIT
  Kerberos 1.7 and later.

  To support synchronization with an AFS kaserver, the server must have
  the Authen::Krb5 Perl module installed.

  To run the full test suite, all of the above software requirements must
  be met.  Tests requiring some bit of software that's not installed will
  be skipped, but all the permutations have not yet been checked.  The
  test suite also requires the Perl modules Test::More and Test::Pod.
  Test::More comes with Perl 5.8 or later and is available separately from
  CPAN.  Test::Pod is available from CPAN.  The test suite also requires
  that remctld be installed and available on the user's path or in
  /usr/local/sbin or /usr/sbin, that test cases can run services on and
  connect to ports 14373 and 14444 on 127.0.0.1, and that kinit and kvno
  (which come with Kerberos) be installed and available on the user's
  path.  The full test suite also requires a local keytab, a srvtab with
  ADMIN access to a test AFS kaserver, and some additional configuration.

  If you change the Automake files and need to regenerate Makefile.in, you
  will need Automake 1.10 or later.  If you change configure.ac or any of
  the m4 files it includes and need to regenerate configure or
  config.h.in, you will need Autoconf 2.61 or later.

BUILD AND INSTALLATION

  You can build and install wallet with the standard commands:

      ./configure --with-wallet-server=<server>
      make
      make install

  The last step will probably have to be done as root.  Currently, this
  always installs both the client and the server.  You must specify the
  default wallet server at configure time unless you're at Stanford.  This
  will be replaced with real client configuration in a later release.

  By default, wallet installs itself under /usr/local except for the
  server Perl modules, which are installed into whatever default site
  module path is used by your Perl installation.  To change the
  installation location of the files other than the Perl modules, pass the
  --prefix=DIR argument to configure.  To change the Perl module
  installation location, you will need to run perl on Makefile.PL in the
  perl subdirectory of the build tree with appropriate options and rebuild
  the module after running make and before running make install.

  If remctl was installed in a path not normally searched by your
  compiler, you must specify its installation prefix to configure with the
  --with-remctl=DIR option.  If the AFS library headers are not found by
  your compiler, specify their location with --with-afs-headers=DIR;
  similarly, if the AFS libraries are not found by your compiler, specify
  their location with --with-afs-libs=DIR.

  Currently, building in a different directory from the source directory
  is not supported due to the complexity of integration with the Perl
  build process.  This will be corrected in a later release.

TESTING

  The wallet system comes with an extensive test suite which you can run
  with:

      make check

  In order to test the client in a meaningful way and test the keytab
  support in the server, however, you will need to do some preparatory
  work before running the test suite.  Review the files:

      tests/data/README
      perl/t/data/README

  and follow the instructions in those files to enable the full test
  suite.  Note that testing the AFS kaserver requires creating a srvtab
  with ADMIN access to a running AFS kaserver; if you don't care about AFS
  kaserver synchronization, you may want to skip that part of the test
  suite configuration.

  The test suite also requires some additional software be installed that
  isn't otherwise used by the wallet.  See REQUIREMENTS above for the full
  list of requirements for the test suite.  The test driver attempts to
  selectively skip those tests for which the necessary configuration is
  not available, but this has not yet been fully tested in all of its
  possible permutations.

  If a test case fails, please run that individual test program directly
  and send me the output when reporting the problem.

CONFIGURATION

  For the basic setup and configuration of the wallet server, see the file
  docs/setup in the source distribution.  You will need to set up a
  database on the server (unless you're using SQLite), initialize the
  database, install remctld and the wallet Perl modules, and set up
  remctld to run the wallet-backend program.

  Before setting up the wallet server, review the Wallet::Config
  docuemntation (with man Wallet::Config or perldoc Wallet::Config).
  There are many customization options, some of which must be set.  You
  may also need to create a Kerberos keytab for the keytab object backend
  and give it appropriate ACLs, set up keytab-backend and its remctld
  configuration on your KDC if you want unchanging flag support, and set
  up a srvtab if you want AFS kaserver synchronization support.

  The client currently has no configuration options and hard-codes the
  wallet server and port at compile time.  This will change in a future
  release.

THANKS

  To Roland Schemers for the original idea that kicked off this project
  and for the original implementation of the leland_srvtab system, which
  was its primary inspiration.

  To Anton Ushakov for his prior work on Kerberos v5 synchronization and
  his enhancements to kasetkey to read a key from an existing srvtab.

  To Jeffrey Hutzelman for his review of the original wallet design and
  multiple useful discussions about what actions and configurations the
  wallet would need to support to be useful outside of Stanford.

  To Huaqing Zheng, Paul Pavelko, David Hoffman, and Paul Keser for their
  reviews of the wallet system design and comments on design decisions and
  security models.