stronger ciphers support for NFS on RHEL5 (Secure NFS under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4)

Mikhail T. mi+thun at aldan.algebra.com
Wed Oct 28 17:33:49 EDT 2009


Hello!

The message at

    http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/kerberos/2008-March/013398.html

warns about using anything but des-cbc-crc for NFS-access on Linux, but
ends with:

    RHEL 5 has MIT 1.6, so the problem shouldn't exist there.
      

I'm currently struggling to make the KRB5-secured NFS-mounts work
between RHEL-5.4 client and a Solaris-8 server. The mounts succeed:

    apdevl:/krbexport on /mnt type nfs (rw,intr,sec=krb5,addr=x.x.x.x)

but any attempt to access the mounted share (/mnt) is denied. All such
attempts also result in the following messages logged by rpc.gssd on the
client:

    WARNING: Failed to create krb5 context for user with uid 18039 for
    server apdevl.dev.pathfinder.com

Am I right thinking, the problem is due to des-cbc-crc being disabled
realm-wide here? (The DES cipher is deemed too insecure by the network
admins.) Should I still have this problem -- despite running RHEL-5.4?
Any chance, support for stronger ciphers was added to Linux NFS-clients
since RHEL-5.4 was released?

Thanks a lot! Yours,

    -mi




More information about the Kerberos mailing list