[OpenAFS] Re: feasibility of moving lightweight-principals issue "upstream" to kerberos

[Jeffrey Altman]

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Adam Megacz wrote:
> Jeff, your solutions are a bit like saying that everybody should just
> be happy using an 8086 CPU because it's Turing-complete.  It's not
> "wrong", but if users have to jump through a lot of hoops, or even one
> hoop *per cell*, they'll simply avoid AFS.

I completely agree that ease of use is a serious issue.  Its a huge
problem for any distributed application service that requires
authentication, authorization and auditing.  I spend a significant
effort working to address this issue.   The Network Identity Manager
is one outcome of my work.

You wish to use an authentication system other than Kerberos.  That's
fine.  You can do so in the manner I have described.  OpenAFS is working
to separate itself from the provision of authentication services.  I
can't speak for the other gatekeepers, but I would be very reluctant to
adopt a new authentication service into the OpenAFS distribution.

Instead, a general purpose PGP-based authentication service should be
deployed for which one use can be the acquisition of AFS tokens.  If
you implement it properly OpenAFS administrators should be able to
deploy your service instead of a Kerberos realm and users should be
able to install your afspgplog tool to obtain tokens instead of aklog.

aklog and asetkey are being integrated into the OpenAFS distribution
because the vast majority of all AFS environments use Kerberos and the
failure to provide these tools has made migration from Kerberos 4 to
Kerberos 5 difficult for many sites.

If a new authentication service becomes widely deployed and begins
to achieve significant use with OpenAFS, then of course I would
consider the integration of additional clients.

> Furthermore, while your Network Identity Manager thing is indeed quite
> cool, it is unfortunately Windows-specific.

You are more than welcome to port it to other platforms.   The biggest
challenges will be the lack of CCAPI on most UNIX-like operating systems
and replacing the UI.  A version of CCAPI that can be ported to
platforms other than Windows and MacOS X should be available as part of
MIT Kerberos 1.5.

I must point out that one of the primary reasons a tool such as the
Network Identity Manager and the CCAPI do not exist on platforms other
than Windows and MacOS X is that none of the organizations that have
funded development of such tools have considered the UNIX platforms
worth spending the money on.  Users have succeeded in using the command
line tools for many years even when they have not been bundled with
the AFS distribution.  Whereas on Windows and MacOS there have been
a wide variety of ticket management tools development by organizations.

When I discuss the use of PKINIT and PKCROSS as methods for solving the
ease of use problems, I am not attempting to solve a problem for AFS but
instead for all services.  I seriously believe that Kerberos can be an
authentication solution for everything from P2P to Federated Systems.
I want to see users be able to login to their local standalone system
and be able to use their local machine credentials to authenticate to
a Yahoo Calendar service that currently the access with an e-mail
address and a password they store in their browser's password database.
I want users to have the option of choosing which authentication service
they want to use for identification to an arbitrary application service.
I want application service providers to be able to manage their services
and not need to be responsible for identity management.  In particular,
I want to get application service providers out of the business of
storing and managing passwords for end users.  These are long term goals
that I believe can be addressed over the next seven years.  However,
it is not the goal of OpenAFS to solve these issues.  OpenAFS has its
own issues to solve related to distributed file systems.  It is
important that OpenAFS maintain its focus in order to grow.

Jeffrey Altman


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