Re: [jboss-as7-dev] How hard would it be to support key based auth by default to make life simpler and more secure ?

From: "Jason T. Greene" <jason.greene(a)redhat.com&gt; To: "Darran Lofthouse" <darran.lofthouse(a)jboss.com&gt; Cc: jboss-as7-dev(a)lists.jboss.org Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 7:53:38 AM Subject: Re: [jboss-as7-dev] How hard would it be to support key based auth by default to make life simpler and more secure ?

It's something I thought about, we would have to make up a bunch of stuff in the CERT (not a big deal I guess). Although the thing I worry about is that cert generation requires gathering a major amount of entropy from /dev/random. It would seriously affect boot time, and it would potentially pause for a long period to gather more entropy. This is a problem for headless devices for example, that don't have a keyboard and mouse connected to them.

On 11/14/11 7:57 AM, Darran Lofthouse wrote: > It would need to be SSL not SSH as we need to support the mechanism > for > both the Native interface and the HTTP interface but I am starting > to > like this as an out of the box scenario. > > The advantage we have for the browser is we can always display a > nice > HTML page when they connect with full instructions, it is the other > mechanisms where we have less opportunity to dynamically provide > guidance. > > On 11/14/2011 01:42 PM, Bill Burke wrote: >> You could just have the app-server automatically generate the keys >> for >> you the first time it ever boots (or even every boot cycle). Just >> have >> the CLI look at a pre-defined directory for the generated >> key-pair. THe >> idea here is that CLI works perfectly out-of-the-box with no >> config on >> the same machine as the CLI runs on. What is still protected is a >> remote machine accessing the app-server. This is fine, IMO. >> >> Usability problems still exist though as you would need to import >> the >> client-auth key into your browser. But, maybe this is a good thing >> as >> it will require the user to think about how they want to secure >> the >> app-server. >> >> On 11/14/11 6:40 AM, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> These will make all examples that uses maven deploy plugin, >>>>>> cli scripts, arquillian, jboss tools etc. to somehow >>>>>> either tell users to type in their username and full password >>>>>> in clear text in pom.xml and other files. >>>>>> >>>>>> Which sounds worse to me than a default locked down to only >>>>>> localhost…but I'm not a security expert :) >>>>>> >>>>>> I was wondering how hard it would be to make the >>>>>> authentication support key based auth by default and we make >>>>>> the tools use ${user.name} and ${user.home}/.jboss/default.pub >>>>>> and .priv (or some other name) for the public/private keys ? >>>>> >>>>> You would need a key-based SASL authentication mechanism. There >>>>> are no >>>>> standard ones as of right now. If you know of a key-based SASL >>>>> mechanism that you think we should support, let me know and >>>>> we'll >>>>> evaluate it. >>>> >>>> We would have to do noauth + SSL + trust. I think it's an option >>>> worth considering. The big problem though is that we have to >>>> have a setup process to generate the certs, which is greater >>>> complexity than the user/pass option. We would have to generate >>>> a host key pair and a client key pair. >>> >>> >>> I'm not an expert on these things at all but eclipse uses >>> http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/ to manage and create ssh keys and >>> uses the standard .ssh location's etc. >>> >>> Is something additional needed ? >>> >>> /max >>> http://about.me/maxandersen >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> jboss-as7-dev mailing list >>> jboss-as7-dev(a)lists.jboss.org >>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/jboss-as7-dev >> > _______________________________________________ > jboss-as7-dev mailing list > jboss-as7-dev(a)lists.jboss.org > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/jboss-as7-dev

-- Jason T. Greene JBoss AS Lead / EAP Platform Architect JBoss, a division of Red Hat _______________________________________________ jboss-as7-dev mailing list jboss-as7-dev(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/jboss-as7-dev