Projects/Database Access Layer cleanup

This is an early stage project for MIT Kerberos. It is being fleshed out by its proponents. Feel free to help flesh out the details of this project. After the project is ready, it will be presented for review and approval.

This project page describes ideas for cleaning up the KDB Database Access Layer (DAL). No resources or schedule have been assigned to this project yet.

Master Key Encryption

DB2 and LDAP encrypt key entries in a master key, which is obtained either through password entry at KDC/kadmind startup time or from a stash file. Encryption and decryption of key data is currently performed explicitly in the KDC and libkadm5.

It is possible to construct a database plugin which does not encrypt key data in a master key, but it is hackish: the plugin overrides the default fetch_master_key function to return a dummy key, and overrides the default dbekd_encrypt_key_data and dbekd_decrypt_key_data functions to perform no encryption or decryption.

It would perhaps be cleaner if key encryption and decryption were performed underneath the DAL. Since the user interface features associated with master keys necessarily exist above the DAL, we would still need entry points for implement those features.