Vamsavardhana Reddy wrote:
On 9/15/07, *David Jencks* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:On Sep 15, 2007, at 10:24 AM, Vamsavardhana Reddy wrote:David, Thank you for initiating this discussion and also implementing a quick solution too. Matt asked if I could start a discussion on this. I said "yes" and then went in to a long sleep mode :(. Let me get to business (before I go to sleep again). More inline... On 9/15/07, *David Jencks* < [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: Periodically users show up who want their passwords obscured in new ways that allow their systems to break by removing the key used to obscure them :-) (how's that for a biased view of the situation :-) I have to accept that I share your PoV. They don't like SimpleEncryption because the key is hardcoded and thus the same for all geronimo instances. See GERONIMO-2925 I've implemented something for this request that allows you to register "encryptors" with the EncryptionManager. By default you get the current SimpleEncryption which uses AES with a hardcoded key. There's also a ConfiguredEncryption gbean that will generate and save a key if not present or use a saved one. You can register any number of Encryption instances with EncrptionManager but only the first one you register will be used for encryption. Others might be used for decryption. If you try to encrypt a string that is already encrypted under a different registered Encryption instance it will decrypt using the old Encryption and re-encrypt using the registered Encryption. For instance the properties file login module used to use {Standard} as the prefix instead of {Simple} so I registered the SimpleEncryption instance under both prefixes: the property files are re-encryptedwith the {Simple} prefix.Is this supposed to substitute for "changing the key"?Not really, more for changing to a new encryption type from the Simple default. If you start the server up everything gets encrypted with SimpleEncryption: it would be nice to support at least installing a new Encryption later, which is pretty much what is now supported. If you are careful you can change again. One question I have is whether the current behavior of "first explicitly installed Encryption is the method used" or "last explicitly installed Encryption is the method used" is a better policy. I leantowards "first" because then a user program can't change it as easily.Which user program are we referring to?If you want to use the ConfiguredEncryption you can add this to config.xml under rmi-naming module: <gbean name="org.apache.geronimo.configs/rmi-naming/2.1-SNAPSHOT/car? name=ConfiguredEncryption,j2eeType=GBean" gbeanInfo="org.apache.geronimo.system.util.ConfiguredEncryption "> <attribute name="path">var/security/ConfiguredSecretKey.ser</attribute> <reference name="ServerInfo"><pattern><name>ServerInfo</name></ pattern></reference> </gbean> Does it have to be a file under the server installation directory? At the same time, I don't know if it really matters.No, if you supply an absolute path ServerInfo will "resolve" it to itself.I haven't tried this with app clients yet but I assume that adding this gbean to client would work. I'd appreciate review on this both for the idea of pluggable Encryption and even more for my use of crypto which I am definitely not an expert in. thanks david jencks 1. The changed attributes are stored in config.xml. These will get overwritten when a new encryptor is used, which is as we wanted. What about the attributes that are in config.ser objectswhich are never changed? Do we have to protect these files too? Any default passwords in our server distributions that live inthese config.sers's may not be of much concern as we expect the users to change the default passwords anyway (no point encrypting something that is well-known :o). I am referring to config.ser's created upon deploying new configurations.I think we should advise users to override passwords that may be stored in config.ser in config.xml. We need to figure out how to do this easily :-)Sometime ago I had some code locally (not as part of the server code, but a simple program that searches for config.ser's in the repository and encrypts) to encrypt all config.ser's based on a password and write the "salt" used to a file in the server's directory. When server starts, it looks for this "salt" file and asks for the password so that config.ser's can be decrypted and loaded. We may use something similar without a startup password In this case, a loss of password would mean a totally unusable server :(.
That sounds like a great option to add, for those users who really want to secure their server. Can you open a JIRA so we don't forget to revisit this thought?
2. If a deployment plan is part of the archive being deployed, the plan file will exist in the repository when the archive is extracted to the configuration's directory. Should we get rid of these deployment plans once the archive is distributed as they may contain passwords in clear text?I think we should preserve the source plans for reference and advisepeople not to put sensitive passwords in them.
Agree and this could be another enhancement, that we allow users to provide XML with whole or attribute encryption (like Apache WSS4J for WS-Security) and a tool to encrypt the plans....
Even if there is a deployment plan in the configuration's dir, there is no guarantee that it is the one used for deployment as it may have been deployed using an external deployment plan.There may be other concerns, which I will put down as they come. We may have to come up with some guidelines, make it clear whatthe users can expect from G and how to protect their server. Vamsi PS: May be we should create a wiki page to capture this discussion.At this point I think we should create the wiki page after we decide what to do. Did you have a chance to look at whether I am doing something stupid with the crypto stuff, in particular generating the secret key? You are fine. thanks! david jencks
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