use of AES keys with kinit

Rich Frobose frobose at llnl.gov
Mon Sep 11 14:26:37 EDT 2006


I find that when I have a principal with both a DES key and an AES128 
key then I cannot use kinit to authenticate using a keytab file that 
only has the AES128 key.  I would like to know why I cannot 
authenticate through kinit using just my AES128 key.

The details of my interaction follow:

1. Create the keytab file with just a aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96:normal key:
kadmin.local:  ktadd -k temp.keytab -e 
"aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96:normal"  PRINCIPAL
Entry for principal PRINCIPAL with kvno 5, encryption type AES-128 CTS
mode with 96-bit SHA-1 HMAC added to keytab WRFILE:temp.keytab.

2.  Try to kinit using that keytab file.
kinit -k -t temp.keytab  PRINCIPAL
kinit(v5): Key table entry not found while getting initial credentials

But after adding a des key to the temp.keytab, then the above kinit works.

In trying to research this I noticed the following in the latest (Aug 
4, 2006) "Kerberos V5 application programming library" 
documentation.  In the description of the krb5_get_in_tkt call it 
says that "valid encryption types are ETYPE_DES_CBC_CRC and ETYPE_RAW_DES_CBC".

Am I to understand that the API used by kinit will use only DES keys 
to get initial tickets?  If so, is this just a current implementation 
problem or is there a more basic technical problem that will not let 
kinit be extended to use an AES128 keys?




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