[Pki-devel] Questions regarding addition of our own Cockpit module

Tue Jun 23 00:07:34 UTC 2020

Hello team,

We discussed the possibility of using Cockpit in Dogtag PKI with our whole

team (including Devs, QEs, CEE, POs and PMs). It seems that the proposed

solutions by Martin and Simon seem to require major architectural changes to

Dogtag PKI product itself, which, as Fraser pointed out, circles back to the

requirement of full-fledged IDM environment.

So, as of now, we have decided to use the PatternFly and ReactJS directly to

design our web interface (to stay as close to the cockpit design as
possible).

Regards,

--Dinesh

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 8:36 AM Simon Kobyda <skobyda at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2020-06-05 at 11:13 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> > Hello Dinesh,
> >
> > Dinesh Prasanth Moluguwan Krishnamoorthy [2020-06-03 20:17 -0400]:
> > > I’m part of Dogtag PKI open-source project [1]. Our team strives to
> > > provide
> > > enterprise-class open-source Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) [2].
> >
> > FTR, Simon Kobyda (CCed) is working on a Cockpit page for managing
> > certificates
> > [1]. There may be some overlap here, so perhaps you can meet and
> > exchange some
> > ideas.
> >
>
> This sounds interesting. Is this module of yours (as I guess from email
> subject) mainly oriented for Smart Cards? What use cases does it look
> to solve?
> The module I'm working on is so far oriented about functionalities
> provided by certmonger. It provides UI to functionalities such
> requesting and tracking certificate, importing preexisting certificate
> & key and renewing and resubmiting it.
> It can request certificate from CA configured to certmonger like IPA.
> The module so far doesn't have hard set limitations so it can be
> expanded (for example outside of scope of just certmonger) if we find
> some overlap.
>
> > > 1. According to [3] Cockpit seems to require the host to join the
> > > IdM
> > > domain in order to authenticate PKI users into Cockpit using client
> > > cert
> > > auth. Is it possible to use client cert auth without joining a
> > > domain? Will
> > > that require major changes in Cockpit?
> >
> > To be precise, Cockpit calls sssd to map a given certificate from TLS
> > client
> > cert auth to a user [2], with FindByCertificate().
> >
> > This doesn't *inherently* require IdM. It's just (1) the only way how
> > I got
> > that sssd lookup mechanism to actually work, and (2) it generally
> > makes sense
> > to maintain this cert→user mapping centrally.
> >
> > Allegedly it is possible to configure sssd to do this mapping with
> > local
> > certificates [2]. I played around with that a few weeks ago, as that
> > would be a
> > very interesting use case, but I didn't manage to get it working --
> > apparently
> > the FindByCertificate() sssd method only works with IdM, not with
> > these local
> > certificates. Making that work may be an interesting project.
> >
> > So this all hinges on sssd -- if that can map a certificate, you can
> > log into
> > Cockpit. Cockpit itself would need no modifications for backends
> > other than
> > FreeIPA.
> >
> > > 2. Suppose the user has been authenticated into Cockpit using a
> > > client cert
> > > as described in #1, is it possible for Cockpit to use the same
> > > client
> > > certificate auth to access PKI server? Or do we need to use a
> > > different
> > > auth mechanism?
> >
> > As Fraser already pointed out, cockpit's web server doesn't have the
> > private
> > key that the browser end was using to authenticate, so that doesn't
> > work.
> >
> > Does it have to be TLS client cert auth,  or would kerberos work as
> > well? We
> > are currently designing that so that we can "forward" (or rather,
> > convert/transcend) the initial client cert auth to a kerberos ticket,
> > so that
> > cockpit can use that to further authenticate to services like sudo or
> > ssh.
> > Structurally that's very similar, but it would require the PKI server
> > to accept
> > delegated (S4U) kerberos tickets.
> >
> > Martin
> >
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/skobyda/cockpit-certificates
> > [2]
> >
> https://docs.pagure.org/SSSD.sssd/design_pages/lookup_users_by_certificate.html
> > [3]
> >
> https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/using_authselect_on_a_red_hat_enterprise_linux_host/configuring-and-importing-local-certificates-to-a-smart-card_using_authselect_on_a_red_hat_enterprise_linux_host
> > [4] https://projects.engineering.redhat.com/browse/COCKPIT-542 -- RH
> > internal only
> >
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