[jboss-as7-dev] [JNDI] Secure the access to (local) JNDI tree through java permissions?

[Anil Saldhana]

The org.jboss.as.naming.JndiPermission was introduced in AS5 mainly to 
monitor the CRUD operations on the JNDI when running under the Java 
Security Manager.  This was done as part of Common Criteria Evaluation. 
We need to bring this back for JNDI operations in AS7.

On 11/02/2012 04:40 AM, Lukas Krejci wrote:
> Hi Darran,
>
> seeing you as the assignee of https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AS7-3407, would
> you be able to comment on the problem I outlined below?
>
> Your help is very much appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Lukas
>
> On Friday, November 02, 2012 13:16:15 Jaikiran Pai wrote:
>> I don't think relying on EJB container or other containers to do the
>> necessary checks is always going to work. You never know what gets bound
>> to the JNDI and if it doesn't use the JndiPermission check, then that
>> JNDI bound entry can get exposed to the client.
>>
>> There appears to be a JIRA for this, although I don't know what's being
>> planned in there https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AS7-3407
>>
>> -Jaikiran
>>
>> On Thursday 01 November 2012 10:07 PM, Lukas Krejci wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> we're in the middle of porting RHQ/JBoss ON from JBoss AS 4.2.3 to JBoss
>>> AS
>>> 7.1.1.
>>>
>>> Among many other things we offer the ability to run user scripts (using a
>>> javax.script.ScriptEngine) inside the server. The scripts can access our
>>> APIs to perform various functions. But since they're essentially 3rd
>>> party, we want to execute them in a secured fashion. For that we run RHQ
>>> with a security manager (allowing all permissions by default) and when
>>> executing a script we do that in a separate access control context that
>>> limits what the code being executed can do (like it cannot shutdown the
>>> server using System.exit(), etc).
>>>
>>> Among other things, we don't want the scripts to access our local EJBs
>>> because that would mean they would be able to access unsupported and
>>> possibly insecure APIs.
>>>
>>> When RHQ ran on AS4, we solved the above problem by having our own
>>> IntialContextFactoryBuilder that essentially wrapped any
>>> javax.naming.Context in a wrapper that would check for a certain java
>>> Permission on lookup. All the "normal" code would have it, but the access
>>> control context the scripts run in would NOT have it. This would stop any
>>> attempt to do a (local) JNDI lookup with a SecurityException unless the
>>> JNDI lookup was performed using our "gateway" (that "published" only
>>> secure remote APIs and called them in a privileged action).
>>>
>>> Now with AS7 I don't think the above is possible anymore. There is a
>>> org.jboss.as.naming.JndiPermission that would be ideal for our purposes
>>> but it is not being enforced when doing JNDI lookups of EJBs (as far as I
>>> could debug this is due to using ServiceBasedNamingStore for looking up
>>> EJBs, which doesn't do the check for the JndiPermission).
>>>
>>> How would you go about implementing something like above? Would it even be
>>> a viable approach to take in AS7?
>>>
>>> (One of the obvious solutions would be to implement the security check as
>>> an interceptor on the EJB calls but we tried to avoid that because that
>>> would be done on EVERY ejb call all the time, while the security check
>>> during the JNDI lookup phase would be done only once).
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Lukas