Creating enterprise principals with kadmin

Rick van Rein rick at openfortress.nl
Tue Sep 16 09:32:31 EDT 2014


Hi Greg,

> As I understand the enterprise principal name type based on RFC 6806
> section 5, it is intended to convey an email-style alias which should be
> looked up in some kind of name service to figure out the actual
> principal name and realm for a user.  Active Directory contains such a
> service; the MIT krb5 KDC does not, unless you use a third-party KDB
> module which provides one.

…or find an elegant concept and patch it into an existing one...

> (Our LDAP KDB module supports aliases within
> a realm, but not aliases which point to other realms.)

Yes, I found the is_principal_in_realm() check that is obviously there to
weed out funny responses due to aliases in the LDAP store, crossing
over the boundaries of realms.

> Creating an actual principal entry for an enterprise name doesn't seem
> like a good idea.  A client which makes an AS request for an enterprise
> name should wind up with a ticket for an actual, normal principal name,
> not a ticket for the alias.

That’s why I would combine it with canonicalisation.  That way, the login
with an enterprise name is not the normal mode, but it would translate
to a “real” principal name. This is not enforced by the KDC and the user
should choose to canonicalise, but if someone insisted on a funny name
like joe\@example.com at EXAMPLE.COM then I fail to see hard reasons
to stop him...?

Thanks,
 -Rick


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