GSSAPI contexts used in multiple threads

[Russ Allbery]

Sam Hartman <hartmans at mit.edu> writes:

> Hi.  I'm catching up on email.  I read a discussion (although I cannot
> find it now) of adding support so that an established gss-api context
> can be used in multiple threads at the same time.  This seems like a
> fine feature to add to MIT Kerberos.
>
> However I'm quite puzzled as to how this works for LDAP or any other
> SASL application.  SASL is a stream protocol; it presents an ordered
> stream across the network connection.  In order to guarantee this the
> sasl security layer requires that tokens be wrapped and unwrapped in
> the same order.  If you don't do that you can get into a situation
> where the wrap order is different from the unwrap order and you get
> spurious gap tokens or out of order tokens.  You cannot tell the
> difference between this and an attack.  Also, since SASL applications
> may chunk data into GSS-API tokens in arbitrary order, GSS-API tokens
> may not line up with LDAP PDU boundaries.
>
> So, I'm very confused about how an LDAP implementation could be a
> correct application and run into problems with MIT's current thread
> safety requirements.
>
> I'd appreciate it if people who do remember the original discussion
> could forward my message to the right place to get an answer.

Doing so now.  Thanks!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>