security implications of ignore_acceptor_hostname

[Ben Gooley]

Thanks for the quick response (on a Friday, no less), Greg.
Since our hadoop servers have their own keytabs and the keys therein have
equal privilege, we should be pretty safe if I read your response
correctly.  At least ignore_acceptor_hostname shouldn't introduce much more
risk than without it.



On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 4:24 PM Greg Hudson <ghudson at mit.edu> wrote:

> On 09/28/2018 07:13 PM, Ben Gooley wrote:
> > Could someone explain a possible threat due to enabling
> > "ignore_acceptor_hostname=true" with an example?  I am trying to assess
> the
> > risk in using that configuration.
>
> If you have keys in the keytab file for multiple hostnames, and the
> application asks for a specific one of them, a client could authenticate
> to the other one instead.  An attack might look something like:
>
> * root's keytab has host/machine-hostname and host/service-name,
> service-name being an alias for the web service.
> * www's keytab has host/service-name.
> * sshd asks for an acceptor cred for host at machine-hostname, but the
> library ignores the @machine-hostname part because
> ignore_acceptor_hostname is set to true.
> * An attacker compromises the web service and gains read access to www's
> keytab.
> * The attacker uses the key for host/service-name to print a ticket from
> admin-user to host/service-name.
> * The attacker authenticates to sshd with this ticket and gains root
> access.
>
> The requirements for this attack are (1) a keytab containing keys of
> mixed privilege levels, (2) a compromise of the key for a lower
> privilege level, and (3) a service which is only intended for use with a
> higher privilege level.
>


-- 
Ben Gooley
*Customer Operations Engineer*


* <http://www.cloudera.com>*