[Edge-computing] [keystone] x509 authentication

Lance Bragstad lbragstad at gmail.com
Tue Jan 29 17:55:00 UTC 2019


On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 8:06 AM Waines, Greg <Greg.Waines at windriver.com>
wrote:

> Hey Lance,
>
> I like the plan.
>
>
>
> Just a clarifying question on *“Although, it doesn't necessarily solve
> the network partition issue.”* .
>
>    - I’m assuming this is in a scenario where after the network partition
>    the Edge Cloud and local client(s) do not have access to the Identity
>    Provider ?
>
> Correct. Using x509 certificates to authenticate to keystone still
requires access to keystone. Keystone doesn't necessarily need a link to
the "identity provider" in this case, since the authentication path doesn't
require online validation. This is different from using SAML assertions,
where the entire flow establishes a connection between keystone acting as
the service provider (at the edge) and an identity provider somewhere
authenticating the user.


>
>    -
>    - And in this case, it doesn’t work because ?
>       - For a new local client (without any cached tokens),
>       even if there are local shadow users already configured,
>       the authentication still requires communication with the Identity
>       Provider ?
>
> I guess it depends on the architecture you're considering [0]. There isn't
a hard requirement to talk to the identity provider of an x509 certificate,
but token validation still needs to work.

If you're deploying the architecture with the distributed control plane,
you can authenticate with an x509 certificate against any keystone. For
example, only using a centralized data center and medium/large edge cluster
would make keystone available everywhere, so a network partition might not
be an issue. Conversely, if you authenticate for a token with an x509
certificate and use it to spin up compute resources in a small edge
cluster, which doesn't have a keystone deployment, the network partition is
going to make online token validation impossible, if you're calling APIs in
the small edge directly.

The same issue is going to be present for deployments following the
centralized control plane architecture since keystone is only available in
the central data center and isn't available at the large, medium, or small
edge sites. Validating the token online from edge sites to the centralized
data center is going to be susceptible to network partitions.

In my opinion, the big difference between x509 and other federated
protocols is that it doesn't really have a hard requirement on linking back
to the identity provider. In the case of SAML, the identity provider is
anything that has the ability to issue SAML assertions proving the identity
of its users (e.g., keystone acting as an identity provider, ADFS, etc.)
With x509 certificates, the identity provider is a certificate authority
that issues and signs user certificates. Keystone needs to be configured to
"trust" certificated signed by that certificate authority. When a user
authenticates, keystone relies on SSL plugin libraries to validate the
certificate against the root certificate authority, but this is done
offline since the SSL configuration has a copy of the root certificates.
>From there, the plan is to treat each trusted certificate authority as its
own identity provider, so all users with certificates signed by the same
authority get mapped into the same namespace/identity provider. Once the
users have their signed certificate, they can authenticate for tokens
without a link being established between keystone and whatever certificate
authority issued the certificate.

The downside is that certificate revocation and certificate distribution is
now a thing you need to worry about. James might have more input there
since it sounds like this is the approach they are shooting for with Athenz
(which is the certificate authority in their case.)

I hope that helps clear things up?

[0]
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group/Edge_Reference_Architectures


>
>    -
>       -
>
> Is this correct ?
>
>
>
> Greg.
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Lance Bragstad <lbragstad at gmail.com>
> *Date: *Friday, January 25, 2019 at 2:16 PM
> *To: *"edge-computing at lists.openstack.org" <
> edge-computing at lists.openstack.org>, "
> openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org" <
> openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org>
> *Subject: *[Edge-computing] [keystone] x509 authentication
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
>
>
> We've been going over keystone gaps that need to be addressed for edge use
> cases every Tuesday. Since Berlin, Oath has open-sourced some of their
> custom authentication plugins for keystone that help them address these
> gaps.
>
>
>
> The basic idea is that users authenticate to some external identity
> provider (Athenz in Oath's case), and then present an Athenz token to
> keystone. The custom plugins decode the token from Athenz to determine the
> user, project, roles assignments, and other useful bits of information.
> After that, it creates any resources that don't exist in keystone already.
> Ultimately, a user can authenticate against a keystone node and have
> specific resources provisioned automatically. In Berlin, engineers from
> Oath were saying they'd like to move away from Athenz tokens altogether and
> use x509 certificates issued by Athenz instead. The auto-provisioning
> approach is very similar to a feature we have in keystone already. In
> Berlin, and shortly after, there was general agreement that if we could
> support x509 authentication with auto-provisioning via keystone federation,
> that would pretty much solve Oath's use case without having to maintain
> custom keystone plugins.
>
>
>
> Last week, Colleen started digging into keystone's existing x509
> authentication support. I'll start with the good news, which is x509
> authentication works, for the most part. It's been a feature in keystone
> for a long time, and it landed after we implemented federation support
> around the Kilo release. Chances are there won't be a need for a keystone
> specification like we were initially thinking in the edge meetings.
> Unfortunately, the implementation for x509 authentication has outdated
> documentation, is extremely fragile, hard to set up, and hasn't been
> updated with improvements we've made to the federation API since the
> original implementation (like shadow users or auto-provisioning, which work
> with other federated protocols like OpenID Connect and SAML). We've started
> tracking the gaps with bugs [0] so that we have things written down.
>
>
>
> I think the good thing is that once we get this cleaned up, we'll be able
> to re-use some of the newer federation features with x509
> authentication/federation. These updates would make x509 a first-class
> federated protocol. The approach, pending the bug fixes, would remove the
> need for Oath's custom authentication plugins. It could be useful for edge
> deployments, or even deployments with many regions, by allowing users to be
> auto-provisioned in each region. Although, it doesn't necessarily solve the
> network partition issue.
>
>
>
> Now that we have an idea of where to start and some bug reports [0], I'm
> wondering if anyone is interested in helping with the update or refactor.
> Because this won't require a specification, we can get started on it
> sooner, instead of having to wait for Train development and a new
> specification. I'm also curious if anyone has comments or questions about
> the approach.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Lance
>
>
>
> [0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/keystone/+bugs?field.tag=x509
>
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