Admin session expiry

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

It's not necessary to disable the admin principal or expire the session to get this effect. The admin service is itself a Kerberos-authenticated service, and Kerberos tickets expire. Without valid tickets for the admin service, it is not possible to make a request, regardless of whether or not you happen to have a TCP connection open to the server.


By setting the max ticket lifetime for admin principals and/or the kadmin/admin service principal, you can limit the time these tickets are valid, and this the time during which it is possible to make admin requests.


-- Jeff

________________________________
From: John Devitofranceschi <jdvf at optonline.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2019 10:34
To: Greg Hudson
Cc: kerberos at mit.edu
Subject: Re: Admin session expiry

On Jan 13, 2019, at 1:49 AM, Greg Hudson <ghudson at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On 1/11/19 11:08 AM, Yegui Cai wrote:
>> Any plan to add the capability of expiring admin sessions into a future
>> release?
>
> We can consider it, although it would come at a complexity cost in the
> network code.  Can you describe why that feature is important in your
> deployment?
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Banks and other highly regulated environments have requirements to implement controls around  the access of individuals to systems and data.

This includes “just in time” access provisioning and time-bound access to sensitive systems.

For a detailed example, see ch. 11.1 of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s “Technology Risk Management Guidelines” (TRM Guidelines <http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/MAS/Regulations%20and%20Financial%20Stability/Regulatory%20and%20Supervisory%20Framework/Risk%20Management/TRM%20Guidelines%20%2021%20June%202013.pdf>)

"The [Financial Institution] should only grant user access to IT systems and networks on a need-to-use basis and within the period when the access is required.”

Now, these kinds of things are often vague and you can probably satisfy the requirements in a number of ways.

You *could* whack the admin session at the network level OR you *could* expire the admin principal that was used to authenticate the session (in an out of band process that’s been set up to manage such access) and demonstrate that even with a connected admin session the expired principal renders the session useless.

One of the key points for such controls is being able to provide evidence that the control is being met since it is not sufficient to do the right thing, you have to also be able to *prove* that you’re doing the right thing.  This is another can of worms entirely.

jd
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