[Freeipa-devel] kerberos auth issue

[Simo Sorce]

On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 15:30 -0400, Karl MacMillan wrote:
> 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?

Even better if we can replace cert with krb on the right side as well,
even without forwarding, just reauth as a service with LDAP/SASL/GSSAPI

Simo.