[Pulp-dev] Moving Content Guard Authorization to Webserver and out of pulp-content

James Cassell fedoraproject at cyberpear.com
Wed Mar 11 19:02:26 UTC 2020


On Wed, Mar 11, 2020, at 2:58 PM, Brian Bouterse wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 2:34 PM Justin Sherrill <jsherril at redhat.com> wrote:
> > We had discussed base64 encoding the cert in the webserver on the way in and then letting cert guard decode it. While that's not ideal I think it has some advantages over moving the full auth into the webserver. What was your motivation for going with that approach over the base64 encoding approach? 
> 
> Thank you for this question! I ended up with a few different concerns 
> about the base64 encode-and-forward idea. Architecturally the concern 
> with it is that it's frowned upon to forward the client's TLS cert 
> beyond the TLS termination point because that is what MITM software 
> does. Also, there are some practical concerns: one, I don't think nginx 
> can provide a similar runtime base64 encoding feature. Also I was 
> concerned with header length truncation and what happens when the 
> certificates get longer.
> 
> Overall having auth that is based on TLS certificates brought me to the 
> conclusion that we need to auth where the TLS is terminated. What do 
> you think?
> 
> More thoughts and questions are welcome. This is a good discussion.
> 

I agree with your points.

Also, having the auth in the web server would allow me (random bystander) to use the functionality without actually running a full pulp; just plain candlepin with yum repos behind a web server.


V/r,
James Cassell

> 
> > On 3/11/20 2:11 PM, Brian Bouterse wrote:
> >> tl;dr: What we have today cannot work with rhsm certificates which Katello uses. To resolve, we need to have content guard checking moved to the webserver configs for apache and nginx and not done in pulp-content as it is today. https://pulp.plan.io/issues/6323
> >> 
> >> We need to bring the auth to where TLS is terminated because we can't being the client certs to pulp-content due to invalid header characters. As is, pulp-certguard cannot work with Katello's cert types (rhsm certs) so that is driving my changes.
> >> 
> >> If anyone has major concerns or other ideas please let me know. In the meantime I'm proceeding moving the authorization to the webserver and then updating pulp-certguard to work with that. This will make pulp-certguard's GA tied to pulpcore 3.3.0. Feedback is welcome.
> >> 
> >> [0]: https://pulp.plan.io/issues/6323
> >> 
> >> Thanks,
> >> Brian
> >> 





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