![Simo Sorce](/assets/img/avatar_default.png)
The main advantge of this new upcall mechanism is that it can handle big tickets as seen in Kerberos implementations where tickets carry authorization data like the MS-PAC buffer with AD or the Posix Authorization Data being discussed in IETF on the krbwg working group. The Gssproxy program is used to perform the accept_sec_context call on the kernel's behalf. The code is changed to also pass the input buffer straight to upcall mechanism to avoid allocating and copying many pages as tokens can be as big (potentially more in future) as 64KiB. Signed-off-by: Simo Sorce <simo@redhat.com> [bfields: containerization, negotiation api] Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>
92 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
92 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
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rpcsec_gss support for kernel RPC servers
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=========================================
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This document gives references to the standards and protocols used to
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implement RPCGSS authentication in kernel RPC servers such as the NFS
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server and the NFS client's NFSv4.0 callback server. (But note that
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NFSv4.1 and higher don't require the client to act as a server for the
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purposes of authentication.)
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RPCGSS is specified in a few IETF documents:
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- RFC2203 v1: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2203.txt
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- RFC5403 v2: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5403.txt
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and there is a 3rd version being proposed:
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- http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-williams-rpcsecgssv3.txt
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(At draft n. 02 at the time of writing)
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Background
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----------
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The RPCGSS Authentication method describes a way to perform GSSAPI
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Authentication for NFS. Although GSSAPI is itself completely mechanism
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agnostic, in many cases only the KRB5 mechanism is supported by NFS
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implementations.
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The Linux kernel, at the moment, supports only the KRB5 mechanism, and
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depends on GSSAPI extensions that are KRB5 specific.
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GSSAPI is a complex library, and implementing it completely in kernel is
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unwarranted. However GSSAPI operations are fundementally separable in 2
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parts:
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- initial context establishment
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- integrity/privacy protection (signing and encrypting of individual
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packets)
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The former is more complex and policy-independent, but less
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performance-sensitive. The latter is simpler and needs to be very fast.
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Therefore, we perform per-packet integrity and privacy protection in the
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kernel, but leave the initial context establishment to userspace. We
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need upcalls to request userspace to perform context establishment.
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NFS Server Legacy Upcall Mechanism
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----------------------------------
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The classic upcall mechanism uses a custom text based upcall mechanism
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to talk to a custom daemon called rpc.svcgssd that is provide by the
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nfs-utils package.
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This upcall mechanism has 2 limitations:
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A) It can handle tokens that are no bigger than 2KiB
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In some Kerberos deployment GSSAPI tokens can be quite big, up and
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beyond 64KiB in size due to various authorization extensions attacked to
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the Kerberos tickets, that needs to be sent through the GSS layer in
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order to perform context establishment.
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B) It does not properly handle creds where the user is member of more
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than a few housand groups (the current hard limit in the kernel is 65K
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groups) due to limitation on the size of the buffer that can be send
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back to the kernel (4KiB).
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NFS Server New RPC Upcall Mechanism
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-----------------------------------
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The newer upcall mechanism uses RPC over a unix socket to a daemon
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called gss-proxy, implemented by a userspace program called Gssproxy.
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The gss_proxy RPC protocol is currently documented here:
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https://fedorahosted.org/gss-proxy/wiki/ProtocolDocumentation
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This upcall mechanism uses the kernel rpc client and connects to the gssproxy
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userspace program over a regular unix socket. The gssproxy protocol does not
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suffer from the size limitations of the legacy protocol.
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Negotiating Upcall Mechanisms
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-----------------------------
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To provide backward compatibility, the kernel defaults to using the
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legacy mechanism. To switch to the new mechanism, gss-proxy must bind
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to /var/run/gssproxy.sock and then write "1" to
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/proc/net/rpc/use-gss-proxy. If gss-proxy dies, it must repeat both
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steps.
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Once the upcall mechanism is chosen, it cannot be changed. To prevent
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locking into the legacy mechanisms, the above steps must be performed
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before starting nfsd. Whoever starts nfsd can guarantee this by reading
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from /proc/net/rpc/use-gss-proxy and checking that it contains a
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"1"--the read will block until gss-proxy has done its write to the file.
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