gnome-keyring Obtaining a TGT without unrestricted access to password.

David Woodhouse dwmw2 at infradead.org
Thu Jun 16 12:21:45 EDT 2011


On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 11:07 -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
> > How does one square away the storing of a passwd in memory against
> > this existing prevalent use case?  Other than simply transitioning
> > to OTP in order to defeat it?
> 
> You either ignore this problem or you use OTP or PKINIT with
> non-extractable private keys stored in smartcards. 

Or perhaps you don't consider it a problem at all, since it is the
predominant mode of operation of Windows clients.

I appreciate the KDC-admin viewpoint being presented, and I'm certainly
not suggesting that you should accept this kind of caching behaviour on
your well-run networks.

But most people running a Kerberos server probably don't even know
they're doing it.

What I'm trying to achieve here is *optional* client behaviour which is
acceptable on a "typical" Windows network, both from the security (for
the admin) and the usability (for the user) point of view.

What I need to do, since I cannot *force* the admin to change policies
for the benefit of the Linux clients, is fit in with the Windows model. 
Which as far as I can tell is to remember your password (or maybe just
the str2key result) when you log in, and then use it to automatically
obtain a TGT for you when you need it. And then ask you to provide a new
password if it finds that your password on the network has changed.

I understand that there are issues with that model, but it is a
commonly-accepted model that I think we need to be able to support
*somehow*.

-- 
dwmw2




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