Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Also, does this incur performance problems?
> 
> It's certainly slower, and it means that you can't use mod_perl, mod_php,
> etc. and have to run an external interpretor.  That's definitely not
> ideal, and it would be nice to have a better solution to that.  But
> maintaining a separate token for a particular Apache thread is very hard.
> 
> People doing things that require higher performance have to convince us
> that they know what they're doing and won't cause security vulnerabilities
> and can be trusted with the more general server credentials.  (Which are
> still not particularly strong, to mention.)

You really can't keep a separate per-thread token with AFS unless you
are willing to use a user-mode cache manager linked to Apache.  If you
do, you can access AFS as the user for web operations but anything
external such as CGI/PHP, Tomcat, or ColdFusion still loses.

With Apache 2.0/2.1, it is possible to construct an implementation
using the pre-fork model that allows you to associated a single token
with each request that will also be used for CGI/PHP but not for Tomcat
or ColdFusion.  In this model, you can set per-directory rules that
indicate whether the external application should run with a web-server
token, the user token, or no token at all and manipulate the contents
of a per-process PAG.

I am working with a member of the Apache development team to develop
an Apache 2.0/2.1 module which will provide such functionality.

Jeffrey Altman

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