On 16/05/17 01:09, Lance Bragstad wrote: > > > On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Monty Taylor <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > On 05/11/2017 02:32 PM, Lance Bragstad wrote: > > Hey all, > > One of the Baremetal/VM sessions at the summit focused on what > we need > to do to make OpenStack more consumable for application > developers [0]. > As a group we recognized the need for application specific > passwords or > API keys and nearly everyone (above 85% is my best guess) in > the session > thought it was an important thing to pursue. The API > key/application-specific password specification is up for > review [1]. > > The problem is that with all the recent churn in the keystone > project, > we don't really have the capacity to commit to this for the > cycle. As a > project, we're still working through what we've committed to > for Pike > before the OSIC fallout. It was suggested that we reach out to > the PWG > to see if this is something we can get some help on from a > keystone > development perspective. Let's use this thread to see if there > is anyway > we can better enable the community through API > keys/application-specific > passwords by seeing if anyone can contribute resources to this > effort. > > > In the session, I signed up to help get the spec across the finish > line. I'm also going to do my best to write up something > resembling a user story so that we're all on the same page about > what this is, what it isn't and what comes next. > > > Thanks Monty. If you have questions about the current proposal, Ron > might be lingering in IRC (rderose). David (dstanek) was also > documenting his perspective in another spec [0]. > > > [0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/440593/ > >
Based on the specs that are currently up in Keystone-specs, I would highly recommend not doing this per user. The scenario I imagine is you have a sysadmin at a company who created a ton of these for various jobs and then leaves. The company then needs to keep his user account around, or create tons of new API keys, and then disable his user once all the scripts he had keys for are replaced. Or more often then not, disable his user and then cry as everything breaks and no one really knows why or no one fully documented it all, or didn't read the docs. Keeping them per project and unrelated to the user makes more sense, as then someone else on your team can regenerate the secrets for the specific Keys as they want. Sure we can advise them to use generic user accounts within which to create these API keys but that implies password sharing which is bad. That said, I'm curious why we would make these as a thing separate to users. In reality, if you can create users, you can create API specific users. Would this be a different authentication mechanism? Why? Why not just continue the work on better access control and let people create users for this. Because lets be honest, isn't a user already an API key? The issue (and the Ron's spec mentions this) is a user having too much access, how would this fix that when the issue is that we don't have fine grained policy in the first place? How does a new auth mechanism fix that? Both specs mention roles so I assume it really doesn't. If we had fine grained policy we could just create users specific to a service with only the roles it needs, and the same problem is solved without any special API, new auth, or different 'user-lite' object model. It feels like this is trying to solve an issue that is better solved by fixing the existing problems. I like the idea behind these specs, but... I'm curious what exactly they are trying to solve. Not to mention if you wanted to automate anything larger such as creating sub-projects and setting up a basic network for each new developer to get access to your team, this wouldn't work unless you could have your API key inherit to subprojects or something more complex, at which point they may as well be users. Users already work for all of this, why reinvent the wheel when really the issue isn't the wheel itself, but the steering mechanism (access control/policy in this case)? Tangentially related to this (because my reasons are different), on our cloud I'm actually working on something like this, but under the hood all I'm doing is creating a user with a generated password and enforcing a username convention. I ask them for a name and what roles they want for the user and I spit out: username: "service_user_for_web_app_1@<project_id>" password: "<some_generated_password>" l'lI always generate/regenerate that password for them, and once shown to them once, they can't ever see it again since the plaintext secret is never stored. Sure I can't stop them from logging into the dashboard with that user or changing the password themselves directly, but that's impossible to avoid without being able to set a fine grained role that this user can't access password changing stuff. Ultimately though the user changing their password isn't a problem, and someone else can always delete the user or regen a password. The only reason I'm even working on this is because we currently only allow emails as username on our cloud through our management service. We did that to avoid unique name constraints in a single domain, and to allow us easier ways to do password reset tokens and inviting others to join your project and set their own user password. But... our customers also need a way to create service users with set roles. By enforcing the name@<project_id> convention I get around the username unique constraint but let them give useful descriptive names to these users. Also worth noting that we have some custom policy files to allow some very limited fine grained access control with roles. All I really want/need is better/dynamic policies and honestly users are all the API keys I can ever see being needed.
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