On Nov 6, 2007, at 6:27 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:

On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 11:23:30AM -0700, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
I'm not entirely sure what the intended semantics of
krb_match_realm
are, but if you're trying to match the GSSAPI-authenticated name
against
"value_of(PGUSER)@value_of(krb_match_realm)" then you need to
construct
that string, gss_import_name() it, and then gss_compare_name() the
imported name with the authenticated name that GSSAPI already
gave you.
I know the API overhead of doing that is a PITA, but that's
what's going
to work.

Why?

Because if we're using the GSSAPI then we need to use the properties
defined by the GSSAPI, and not depend on observed behavior of
specific
implementations of specific mechanisms.  Otherwise things will be
non-portable or unreliable in ways that may be non-obvious.

In particular gss_display_name() produces a character string intended
for display to a human being.  It is *NOT* intended for access
control.
As another example, Heimdal gss_display_name() puts '\' escapes in
front
of special characters in the username.  I don't think it's worth
writing
special case code for that either.

Ok. I can see that point. However, if you have those characters in
your
username, you may have other problems as well :-)

Yeah.  Not many people put spaces inside usernames.

I think we can easily get away with not covering that case.

*sigh*  Yeah, maybe we have to live with it.

Is there some other way to actually get the username from gss? I mean,
if we *didn't* get it from the startup packet, how would we ever be
able
to determine what user logged in?

gss_export_name(), but what it returns is supposed to be an opaque
binary blob.

It's guaranteed to produce a unique, canonicalized name based on the
specific mechanism in use.  It is suitable for memcmp().  The
exported name will re-import.  Section 3.10 of rfc 2744 describes all
this, and appears to be clearer than the Sun document I pointed you
at.  Certainly it's more concise.  YMMV.

Hmm. But it doesn't serve our purpose.

Well, it *might* work to do a memcmp() of tolower() of the blobs.

memcmp() on exported names will only be true if everyone uses the
same gss mechanism.  (OK, the only one we care about is kerberos.)
In contrast it's possible that gss_compare_name() would say that
"uid=smith,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com" is the same as
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

No, memcmp()ing two separate strings (userid + match realm) with an opaque
binary blob certainly won't help us at all.


The standard defines two ways to do comparisons for access
control.  We
should use one of them.  Anything else is going to be more work
and less
reliable.

What's the other way then?

Last I checked there was no way to do case insensitive matching on
gss_compare_name() but I could be on the wrong docs? Finding any
kind of
consistent docs for this stuff isn't exactly easy.
Because we *must* have the ability to do case insensitive matching, or
it *will* break on Windows.

No gss_compare_name() is case sensitive.  I think the way to do it is
to know what case Microsoft is going to use and pre-map everything to
that case (before you do a gss_import_name()).  I *think* Microsoft
will use upper case for the service name so we will need to change
from "postgres" to "POSTGRES" as the default name in service
principals.  I've seen places where they may be using lower case
realm names (which makes *NO* sense to me).

No. Microsoft will send you whatever case the user put into the login box when he logged into windows. It's case-*preserving*, but case- insensitive.

That can't be entirely true. Maybe it's true for Microsoft's RC4 enctype, but it can't be true for the des-cbc-md5 enctype. The protocol runs with some case, and the question is what case it uses when it matters.

However, AD itself requires uppercase service name, but that's a different
thing.

OK.

Absent an environment where I can actually look at all these things,
my only point of reference is mod_auth_kerb, and the issues reported
with it.  I know an upper case "HTTP" is needed to interoperate with
windows clients.  An upper case realm name seems to be OK, as is a
lower case server name in the second component.  The actual usernames
seem to be lower case, but that's not the concern of the
mod_auth_kerb developers since the deployer just needs to put in
whatever matches.

The usernames depend on what the client puts in. It's generally a big
problem because a lot of krb-aware applications can't deal with it.

I'd bet that the authenticated username in the service ticket is always a specific case. I'd also bet that it's whatever case the username was created with, e.g. "Smith". Without being able to inspect packets myself I'm only guessing though.

I assume in AD you can't create both "smith" and "Smith", but can you
create the latter at all?  If you do, does AD remember the case for
display purposes?  Here at JPL usernames are lower case, and I don't
think we allow anything special but hyphens in them, so I'm not
likely to see a lot of the possible corner cases.

You can and it remembers. But it has no effect on what is sent ni the
kerberos packets - what's sent there is what the user typed in. Yes, that
sucks bad, but that's how it is.

Hmmm. See above. It isn't possible to make it irrelevant everywhere, unless you only use RC4. Vista uses AES so it looses that loophole though.

Expanding a bit: I can believe that the client uses the entered case in the AS_REQ. It's even possible that the DC follows suit for parts of the AS_REP. However I doubt that a non-Windows Kerberos client can do even that initial exchange unless the case of the username matches properly because the username is part of the salt used to convert passwords to keys.

For a non-windows client I think you can assume the case will always match.

The question is what does the DC put in the service ticket as the authenticated username. (A secondary question is if it's different if the original authentication was to a non-Windows Kerberos server.) I would bet that it puts the originally defined case in the service ticket (at least in the secondary case).

I wonder if case conversion is the right way to create compatibility with GSSAPI though. If the user always comes in with a specific case then shouldn't we instead find a way to make sure the PG user is created with the corresponding case? There are several ways you can test for the existence of a user in a Kerberos service, for example kinit with a garbage password will give different errors.

If you think a hook in the add user code is in scope I can investigate if there is a way to verify the existence of a username with the GSSAPI instead of the Kerberos API.

It would be really easy to inspect what happens with tcpdump/snoop and Ethereal, but that's the only way I can see to really answer these questions.

I think you can upper case the service name, lower case the server
name, upper case the realm name, and lower case the user name.  If
you can create "Smith" in AD and the user gets authenticated as
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" at the protocol level then that won't work though.

Which is how it is :-(

I can only

From what I can tell, the least bad way to do it is still the patch that
sits in the queue now (pending changes based on Stephens comments, but
those are a differnt thing)

//Magnus

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The opinions expressed in this message are mine,
not those of Caltech, JPL, NASA, or the US Government.
[EMAIL PROTECTED], or [EMAIL PROTECTED]



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