[OpenAFS-devel] Joinable PAG's

[David Thompson]

>At 7:53 PM -0500 5/15/03, Nathan Neulinger wrote:
>>Garance wrote:
>>  > Note that if you did have join-able PAG's, it would not be
>>>  based on the userid who first authenticated to it.  We have
>>>  people who use a shared account for access to local (unix)
>>  > files, and then klog to separate AFS user accounts.
>>
>>>  So, if you're going to have joinable PAG's, then you need to
>>>  attach some password/authentication method which is specific
>>>  to that PAG, and not related to any of the tokens which have
>>  > been used in that PAG.
>>
>>Joinable pags is a purely administrative function, used by
>>almost nobody right now except for a few esoteric system
>>admin functions on select installations, certainly nothing
>>in a normal install/setup.
>>
>>If that capability is objectionable (most people didn't even
>>realize it was possible currently, and at that, only for
>>root/suid=0 procs)

If the credentials in the PAG (whether they are AFS credentials or potentially 
someone else's) are easy to extract and/or insert, the ability to join a PAG 
becomes much less important, IMO.  The (shared) credentials can be stored 
outside the kernel (in some object with conventional protections -- i.e. 
normal file, database, credentials server, etc.) obtained when needed, and 
inserted into a new PAG.

I'm writing an application to re-use PAGs, but that's only to get around the 
1-pag-per-second problem.

--
Dave Thompson  <thomas@cs.wisc.edu>

Associate Researcher                    Department of Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison         http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~thomas
1210 West Dayton Street                 Phone:    (608)-262-1017
Madison, WI 53706-1685                  Fax:      (608)-262-6626
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