SWIG

Phil Ehrens pehrens at ligo.caltech.edu
Fri May 28 20:30:55 EDT 2010


Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 14:25 -0400, Phil Ehrens wrote:
> > I had no trouble wrapping krb5_get_init_creds_password
> > to do password verification, but I would also like to
> > wrap the kadmin functions.
> 
> Be aware that krb5_get_init_creds_password can't securely verify
> passwords by itself.  The same person who is feeding you the password
> can, in many cases, also impersonate a KDC and cause a successful
> initial credentials exchange to occur.  (This is often called the
> "Zanarotti attack," after the first person to think it up.)
> 
> If you have a host key available, you can use krb5_verify_init_creds()
> to ensure that the KDC which issued tickets for the user is also in
> possession of your host key, and is therefore the real KDC.

Thank you, I will add that to my wrapper.

> > There are a few usable interfaces to these functions
> > for various scripting languages, but I think a generic
> > SWIG wrapper would be a far more useful thing, and far
> > more attractive to maintainers.
> 
> Unfortunately, we are not 100% comfortable with the API of our admin
> interface.  We only started installing the header file in the 1.7
> release, and we did so with a big disclaimer saying that it can change
> from version to version (unlike the main krb5 API).

There is no disclaimer in kadmin.h in 1.7, 1.7.1, or 1.8.1.

> A tailored wrapper can adapt to underlying C API changes, but I think
> that's harder to do with a SWIG wrapper.

I don't understand why you feel that way, but please don't
feel obliged to explain, because it's not something that
we need necessarily agree about!

> > If someone could provide me with pseudocode or a C
> > function that contains all the krb5 calls required
> > to do a "get_query" call and clean up afterwards,
> > I think I would be able to do the rest. I'm just
> > having a hard time picking out the required call
> > sequence.
> 
> You could look at what the kadmin client does.  It's basically:
> 
>   kadm5_init_krb5_context
>   kadm5_init_with_password (or similar, as appropriate)
>   kadm5_get_principal
>   kadm5_destroy
>   krb5_free_context

That is exactly what I wanted! Thank you for the help!

Phil
-- 
Phil Ehrens <pehrens at ligo.caltech.edu>|              mm
The LIGO Laboratory, MS 18-34         |           /^(  )^\
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