Revision as of 18:08, 4 December 2012

Description

In 1.11 KRB5 gained client side support for OTP Preauth (RFC 6560), but up until now there is no server side support in tree. Red Hat has created an out-of-tree solution (AuthHub), based upon a plugin model. But our experimenting with this approach has demonstrated:

1. Access to vendor SDKs is non-trivial
2. All vendors provide a RADIUS server for OTP validation

Proposal

The KDC-side support for OTP should read configuration and forward token validation to an appropriate RADIUS server. This plugin will be called otp.

Configuration

Configuration should go into kdc.conf as it may contain secrets that shouldn't be world readable. The configuration is defined as follows:

[otp]
 <name> = {
  vendor = <string>
  length = <integer>
  format = <enum: decimal|hexadecimal|alphanumeric|binary|base64>
  algID  = <string>
  server = {
   remote = <string>
   secret = <string>
   striprealm = <boolean>
   attributes = {
    <name> = <string>
   }
  }
 }

The follow values are informational only and will be sent to the client only if set in the config.

• vendor
• length
• format
• algID

Server configuration is a little more complicated. If no token types are defined in the configuration and a user is configured for OTP access (see below), the otp plugin will fall back to a non-standard RADIUS-over-UNIX-Socket (RoUS; inconceivable!): $KDCDIR/otp.socket. If at least one token type is defined, any token type that does not implement the server section will fall back to RoUS, but with the name of the tokenType: $KDCDIR/<name>.socket.

If a server section is defined, it MUST contain the secret field or the token type will be ignored. This is to prevent insecure message passing in non-RoUS mode. All of the other values are optional, with the following defaults:

• remote: localhost:getservbyname("radius", "udp")
• striprealm: false
• attributes: none

The remote field can contain the following formats:

• host
• host:port
• /path/to/unix/socket

User Strings

Some portion of the otp plugin configuration is user specific. This value will be stored as the user string otp with the following (JSON) format:

[{
   "type": <string>,
   "id": <string>,
   "username": <string>
 }, ...]

All values above are optional. If type is not specified, the following will occur:

• If no token types are defined in the config, we fall back to RoUS mode with the default socket.
• If one or more token type is specified, the first one with valid configuration will be chosen.

Workflow

In the first pass (no PA-OTP-REQUEST present), a PA-OTP-CHALLENGE will be generated from the configuration and user strings.

Upon receipt of a PA-OTP-REQUEST, the KDC will attempt to match the PA-OTP-REQUEST with a tokenInfo from the user string. All matching tokenInfo objects will then be used as configuration for RADIUS validation, in the order they were specified, stopping after the first AccessAccept response is received.

RADIUS Packet

The packet sent to the configured RADIUS server will contain:

• User-Name (default: user principal; realm stripped per config)
• User-Password (otp-value from PA-OTP-REQUEST)
• NAS-Identifier (default: gethostname())
• Service-Type (default: Authenticate-Only)
• Any custom attributes defined

Any of the attributes specified above may be overridden by custom attribute except User-Name and User-Password.

Remaining Issues

• Should we use a RADIUS library or hand-craft packets? We should use a RADIUS library which provides support for EAP methods. Unfortunately no such libraries exist.
• This architecture is not FIPS compliant due to RADIUS' use of MD5