[Freeipa-devel] kerberos auth issue

[Karl MacMillan]

On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 14:36 -0400, Rob Crittenden wrote:
> I ran into a problem with my kerberos authentication in the gui
> and just as I was preparing the patch.
> 
> The current code calls for the XML-RPC server to be protected by 
> kerberos. If authenticated, the server takes REMOTE_USER and uses that 
> as the uid when doing proxying (we could also do a search using it as 
> krbPrincipalName) so the request comes in via something like 
> ipa-finduser which makes the actual HTTP request using the XML-RPC 
> client (rpcclient.py)
> 
> It is in there, during the XML-RPC request, that the GSSAPI magic happens.
> 
> Now this same code in rpcclient.py was orignally going to be used by the 
> GUI as well (write once, use for both) but the GUI is making the request 
> through turbogears/Apache so we won't have the kerberos ticket because 
> forwarding doesn't seem to work. One could argue that we'd do the 
> kerberos auth in the web server that the GUI attaches to, but then how 
> do we pass in the principal name to the XML-RPC server? An unprotected 
> URI? Seems risky and we'd still need to get Apache to set REMOTE_USER.
> 

I thought that the backend of the xml-rpc library was going to be a
python library that the web gui would use directly. The architecture
would be:

xmlrpc-client -----> xmlrpc-server -------> DS
               krb                   cert
browser -----------> web server ----------> DS

That eliminates all of the problems, right?

Karl