Kerberos Security Question

[Esben Nielsen]

I got a little curious about this discussion. Ofcourse root has the right to
do anything on
every traditional system. But what about MAC enabled systems? Can this
potential security
hole be fixed in forinstance NSA's "secure" linux? Or in HP's secured
version?

Esben Nielsen

-----Original Message-----
From: Donn Cave [mailto:donn at u.washington.edu]
Sent: 27. februar 2002 19:17
To: kerberos at mit.edu
Subject: Re: Kerberos Security Question


Quoth tomas_maly at yahoo.com (Tomas Maly):
[... re credentials in /tmp ]
| Any way, I was wondering if it was thought of how to
| secure this hole. Would it be possible to make a
| ticket cache file valid only for a particular process
| group, perhaps? Is there any current ways to tighten
| security? I would like to not force removing root
| access from these untrusted users (such as for their
| Linux PCs).

If you're giving root access to someone, they're trusted!
I guess you mean that they're not worthy of the trust you
place in them?  Something's unclear here.

Here are a couple more questions for you:

- Do these credentials have any value at all?  I mean, do you
  use them, does anyone use them?  It sounds like they're the
  by-product of password validation.  It might take some work
  in login.krb5, but in theory those credentials are optional.

- Following the password validation assumption, are those passwords
  in the clear on the network?

- Can your users actually use Kerberos?  Can they have Kerberos
  telnet or ssh on their desktop?  If you do the Kerberos single
  login thing, and then use your credentials to "log in" to a
  remote host, you don't go through that password validation step
  and wouldn't have credentials there (unless you deliberately
  forward them.)  This is really a _more_ secure way to deal
  with trust issues - compared to say ssh or SSL with passwords,
  where you expose your password to the remote host.

| Also, I've noticed that the login.krb5 program creates
| a pseudo-random filename for the cache (such as
| /tmp/krb5cc_XYZPDQ). Why is this?

You could have several sessions concurrently on the same host.
This way you don't lose your credentials from one session when
another one starts or exits (they're deleted on exit.)

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu
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