Please undeprecate DomainController interface, AccessController,
AccessControlContext and Subject methods, while removing the remaining
methods in JEP411.
Just document that these methods don't do anything by default, and use
the null object pattern where appropriate.
Deprecation is causing developers to remove code that we need, this is
undoing years of hard work, I'm appealing to you to minimise harm where
possible.
eg: https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/11801
--
Regards,
Peter
On 10/02/2023 9:03 am, Peter Firmstone wrote:
Maybe I had the wrong Subject?
I'm still trying to figure out how to migrate before removal of
deprecated API's.
1. Our software architecture is designed and currently relies on
classes in JEP411 for authorisation decisions.
2. It's not possible for our software to have security bolted on as
an afterthought, following removal of authorization.
3. Without authorization, we cannot allow the JVM to have access to
sensitive information.
4. We could place the JVM inside an isolated VM as suggested by
JEP411 proponents, but we can no longer allow the JVM to have
access to sensitive information. It is technically possible to
do this, provided we accept we could no longer use encryption or
authentication, as we cannot introduce sensitive information into
the JVM, then we could use observability tools as a watchdog, to
shutdown and restart the VM if it becomes compromised. However,
that leaves us with very limited functionality.
I realise that OpenJDK likely thinks this is BS, we can just safely
remove SM, it's obsolete now right?
The problem is, we don't fit the standard category of server
programming, eg: once the JVM's warmed up, it no longer dynamically
loads classes, hotspot has compiled them to native binary code; a
server that fits the publish subscribe model, where it only need parse
and validate incoming data from clients, and publish responses.
Server programming is OpenJDK's target market, we get that. Anything
in the client space is frowned upon, we get that too, but we're not in
the client space. Our clients are also servers.
Our distributed service architecture provides dynamic discovery of
services (globally over IPv6). We rely on Authentication, Encryption
(Privacy) and Authorization. Clients of services are often required
to download code dynamically, clients and services first discover and
authenticate available service registrar's using an X500 IPv6
multicast discovery process, with checksums to validate details
required to establish a unicast connection. Unicast IPv6 TCP with
Encryption is used to ensure that communications are private between
authenticated connections while establishing connections to service
registrar's.
Nodes in the distributed network, aren't distinguished as servers and
clients, a node that acts as a client will also provide services, even
if it's just listening to an event service. All threads are run with
authenticated client endpoint Subject's, and service responses with
server Subject's, to allow the use of authenticated TLS connections.
After nodes have discovered each other, the connection is established
like so:
1. Authentication & Establish an Encrypted connection.
2. The service provides the client with; code signer certificates,
if the service requires codebase download, or it may provide a
security hash, used to validate files, it will also communicate a
string that represents URL's from which code can be downloaded.
It will also communicate any permissions it requires. The client
Subject is allowed to grant a restricted set of permissions. The
client may elect to grant the requested permissions, if it has the
privileges to do so.
3. The client provisions a ClassLoader, that's a child of the
ClassLoader that contains the Service's public API, the identity
of this ClassLoader is determined by the CodeSource URI's as well
as the Authenticated identity of the Service. The ClassLoader of
the service proxy represents it's identity in authorization
decisions at the client. Other service proxy's may use the same
codebase URL's, but unless they have identical identity, cannot
load their classes into another service proxy's ClassLoader.
4. At this point, the client unmarshal's the service proxy's Object
state into the ClassLoader, it doesn't use Java de-serialization
to do this, just in case anyone is curious.
5. Only ClassLoaders are responsible for Class resolution, codebase
annotations are not used, neither is RMIClassLoader used to
resolve classes.
6. Now the client (and server) applies constraints to their service
endpoints, placing restrictions on the level of encryption the
service can use for network communications, or the Principal's the
Subject that invokes the service must have.
7. The client can now use the service, by passing parameters to the
proxy's methods and accepting returns. The service proxy may
accept or return other services, these services will have the same
constraints applied, unless clients or services, apply new
constraints.
8. A JVM node may have any number of services proxy's while also
providing services to other nodes, of many different identities,
numerous services may participate in transactions, each one with
it's own identity.
During this process permissions are granted as they are required, once
a service is no longer used, its ClassLoader becomes unreachable,
permissions granted dynamically are removed. The client environment
is otherwise locked down with least privilege policy files, that were
generated and audited during deployment.
We would like to continue to invest in the development of this
software, it's performant, it scales, encryption is very fast, thanks
to recent developments in Java session tickets. We've eliminated
unnecessary DNS calls (the JVM makes many of these, eg URL,
SecureClassLoader, CodeSource), and cleared out synchronized and
blocking code, replaced it with concurrent non blocking code where
possible. It's well tested, much time has been invested into static
analysis and cleaning up and modernizing code. All our hotspots are
native JVM methods. I suspect this is why we are finding bugs in
your TLS code, it isn't thread safe ;)
Hopefully there is a future for this software, however it will depend
our ability to migrate to new versions of Java as they're released.
At least allow us just these few classes to remain (un-deprecated
please, so developers aren't motivated to remove their privileged
calls), even if they contain no implementation, so that we may
instrument them, as we attempt to stay current with OpenJDK.
We are not asking OpenJDK to maintain OpenJDK security using an
authorization framework, we are just asking you to make it possible
for us to maintain our software's security ourselves while running on
your platform. It's not really possible for us to run on anything else.
--
Regards,
Peter.
On 9/02/2023 10:20 am, Peter Firmstone wrote:
I don't think I'm really asking for much here. JEP411's plan will
destroy our ability to manage user and service authorization in our
existing software, at least cut us a little slack. I wish we built
our software on some other authorization API, unfortunately we didn't.
We're just trying to migrate as best we can to future versions of Java.
--
Regards,
Peter Firmstone
On 7/02/2023 12:53 pm, Peter Firmstone wrote:
Hello OpenJDK folk,
SecurityManager, AccessController and AccessControlContext will be
removed in a future version of Java.
Just briefly: Our software is heavily dependant on Java's
Authorization framework, we use ProtectionDomain's to represent
remote services for authorization decisions. We are working out how
to implement a new authorization framework after SecurityManager's
removal.
Many libraries call AccessController#doPrivileged methods, when
these methods are removed, we're going to have a big problem with
viral permissions. Restricted authorization will become
meaningless if it has to be granted to all domains on a call stack.
https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/issues/1687
Retaining methods in the platform that developers can instrument
will provide a common frame of reference for authorization
decisions, that's runtime backward non-breaking, without burdening
OpenJDK with maintenance.
I'm requesting retaining the DomainController interface,
AccessController, AccessControlContext and Subject methods as
no-op's for instrumentation? Please leave them deprecated as
no-op's, but not "deprecated for removal".
https://github.com/pfirmstone/HighPerformanceSecurity
Some thoughts:
1. Ability to disable finalizers in Java 18 onwards is important to
prevent finalizer attacks when instrumenting constructors to
throw a RuntimeException.
2. Guard#check methods can be no-op's for instrumentation. If I
can replace all instances of SecurityManager#checkPermission in
OpenJDK with Guard#check, I can contribute the patches, this
will assist greatly in the transition process of retaining
existing hooks, while developing replacements.
3. Reduce the size of the Java Platform's trusted computing base by
giving all system ProtectionDomain's a CodeSource with a
non-null meaningful URL. Unfortunately Java Serialization is
in the base module, so we cannot authorize it's use with a
permission check, as the base module needs AllPermission, it has
to be managed with serial filters
(https://dzone.com/articles/a-first-look-into-javas-new-serialization-filterin
- perhaps someone will write a serialfilter generation tool that
works similarly to our POLP policy generation tool?).
Privileges cannot be elevated by an authenticated Subject, when
all domains on the call stack are already privileged. If
Serialization was in a different ProtectionDomain, then we could
prevent de-serialization for unauthenticated Subject's.
Perhaps OpenJDK might consider moving Serialization into a
different module in future before it's eventual removal?
4. Instrument all data parsing methods with guard checks, eg XML.
This allows authorization decisions to parse remote data based
on the Principal's of the remotely authenticated Subject, to
prevent injection attacks.
5. We already have principle of least privilege policy generation
tools and efficient policy checking tools for authorization in
place. These allow for simple policy file generation,
auditing, editing and deployment.
--
Regards,
Peter Firmstone
