On 06/10/2015 02:52 AM, Martin Kosek wrote:
On 06/10/2015 05:11 AM, Adam Young wrote:
On 06/09/2015 06:34 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
On Tue, 2015-06-09 at 16:15 -0400, Drew Erny wrote:
Hey, Freeipa, same thread new subtopic.
So, I was bouncing some ideas around with another developer (ayoung) and
I think I have a pretty good idea for self-service user registration.
The idea is that I put self-service user registration into its own
application that calls out to ipa user-add after getting admin approval.
Workflow goes like this:
1.) User goes to registration page, inputs details into form.
Registration page and application are not part of FreeIPA.
2.) User's registration goes into a non-FreeIPA database, something like
SQLite.
3.) Admin gets a notification email with a link to approve/deny
registration.
A.) Admin clicks approval link, registration application (which has
limited privileges) makes call out to ipa user-add command, adding the
new user to FreeIPA.
B.) Admin click deny link, user is not added.
4.) User's registration information, approved or denied, is deleted from
the external database.
This has a couple of advantages. For starters, it provides a layer of
protection against the creation of spam accounts. Accounts do not add
directly to LDAP (inserting to LDAP is a slow operation), instead sit in
intermediate area waiting approval. Second, we don't have to write a big
extension to ipa user-add or staginguser-add that allows anonymous
access to that command. Third, it can be bundled into its own package
and given to the community separate from FreeIPA proper. Finally, it
would allow me to gracefully defer becoming buried up to my neck in
D-Bus notifications and whatever other fanciness we want to send email,
because FreeIPA won't be sending the email.
Opinions?
You could avoid using an external database by using the new USer
Lifecycle management feature [1]. This will allow you to do a simple
ldapadd, but the user will not be enabled until an admin logs into the
FreeIPA interface to enable the user.
This manes your app never needs to see the admin's credentials or use
s4u2proxy and will pose a lower risk to the system.
The big issue was having an unauthentiucated user add o the datastore; I don't
think you want to push new values directly into LDAP. A separate Databse makes
a lot of sense, and using SQLite for a proof of concept allows us to migrate up
to MySQL for a live deployment.
The separate database does not make lot of sense to me, why not using the Stage
User tree when it's there, ready for you? I would like to know what is the
motivation and reasoning for using completely separate DB. Besides others, I
think Stage Users area for example checks for login name or UID/GID collisions.
The Selfservice just needs to operate under an identity that has a Stage User
Administrator privilege or we can create more contained privilege that could
just add the staged users and not modify/remove them.
Well, I'm led to believe that LDAP modifications are a slow operation.
My concern is that if a site got hit with a load of spam, it could slow
down a lot. Enforcing a separation between verified users (who are in
the LDAP database) and the unwashed masses (who sit isolated in a small
relational database, good performance) might be a good thing in a public
environment. We're not talking about much of a database, either; it
should top out at a couple dozen entries on a massive site if the admins
are diligent in clearing it out. If the possible performance hit isn't a
concern (and LDAP databases are not as slow as I'd guessed) then I'll
just the user staging area. Is performance a concern?
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