It's also a problem with servers with SSD's.  I ran into this myself.

Andy

---

From: "Jason T. Greene" <jason.greene@redhat.com>
To: "Darran Lofthouse" <darran.lofthouse@jboss.com>
Cc: jboss-as7-dev@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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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--
Jason T. Greene
JBoss AS Lead / EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
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