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xen-api
Re: [Xen-API] Use of PAM for authentication & SSL comms
On 31 Oct 2006, at 23:29, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
- The XML-RPC api is using a login method where you explicitly
pass in a username & password as the two params. This doesn't
really match up with the PAM model of conversation functions
which request one or more pieces of auth info in sequence. It
strikes me that since XML-RPC is a bi-directional protocol it
would make alot more sense to allow the PAM conversation callbacks
to go back & forth over the XML-RPC channel to collect data from
the client as needed, rather than having the client provide
the username & password ahead of time.
Is that over complicating the login protocol, at least for user name
and password? Then we will have to keep track of not only
authenticated sessions, but also login sessions.
By removing the fixed user/passwd at the client end of the API
it'll be possible to add in support for all the different types
of auth people can configure with PAM. The obvious one being
kerberos GSSAPI single sign on.
Could we just add a new login_with_kerberos_... call to the API for
that and any other method that people can come up with?
- XenD should install its own PAM config file into /etc/pam.d
rather than re-using the context from the 'login' program
Well, the problem I ran into is that every distro has their own
custom PAM stack and any PAM stack we write will only work on one
distro and not another. I believe this is a distro packaging problem.
But your concern is still valid, maybe we have to provide a PAM stack
for one at least one distro. Let's fight to see which one that will
be :)
- If we're using PAM then we must switch all communications to use
SSL by default - no network daemon should be using system
passwords over a cleartext network channel anymore. If we want
to keep a cleartext channel, then we should use a separate
password database & certainly not system logins
Definitely. I've only been testing with a local UNIX domain socket.
Anything that goes over the network needs SSL encryption, but the API
docs don't make any mention of this, presumably because it doesn't
really fall into the API. My guess is we'll need to put some
certificate configuration options in xend-config.sxp or run the Xen
API on a different XMLRPC server than the one that currently serves xm.
Cheers,
Alastair
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