[keycloak-user] Securely setting admin passwords

[Bruno Oliveira]

I can be wrong, but this is not only our responsibility. For example, on
Linux you are prompted for the password with passwd, but at the same time
you could circumvent this using: echo 12345678 | sudo passwd admin --stdin.

In this scenario security auditors won't blame the OS for this, but pretty
much sysadmins and bad security practices. Anyways, whatever people think
is the best, I'm fine.

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:18 PM Stan Silvert <ssilvert at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 2/18/2016 9:10 AM, Bruno Oliveira wrote:
>
> I think the Jira created by Stian pretty much fixes the problem. Nope?
>
> Stian's JIRA says that if it is not specified on the command line then do
> the prompt.  But if we still allow setting it from the command line then
> the password can still be saved to the log in plain text.  Security
> auditors will always frown on that.
>
> So I'm saying we should either disallow setting on the command line or
> somehow disable saving to the log.  We shouldn't rely on an administrator
> to do the right thing.
>
>
>
> Something like:
>
> ./add-user-keycloak.sh -u user
> Password: ******
>
> Or
>
> ./add-user-keycloak-sh
> Username: joe
> Password: ******
>
> If this can't fix the issue, is also possible to disable bash_history
> temporarily. But I wouldn't take this route, because this is pretty much
> system administration responsibility.
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 11:47 AM Stan Silvert <ssilvert at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2/18/2016 2:15 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 17 February 2016 at 17:09, Aikeaguinea <aikeaguinea at xsmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It seems the add-user.sh  script for changing the admin password only
>>> accepts the password as a -p command-line parameter. This would expose
>>> the password in the command history, so I'd prefer not to use the
>>> command in its current form.
>>>
>>
>> That's a mistake we'll fix that. If not specified it should prompt for
>> it. Added https://issues.jboss.org/browse/KEYCLOAK-2501
>>
>> After attending several security talks the last couple of days, I've
>> become rather sensitized to this kind of issue.  I feel quite strongly that
>> we should never allow the password to be written to history in plain
>> text.   I'm also afraid it could cause us to flunk government
>> certifications.
>>
>> On Windows, this really isn't a problem because command history is not
>> saved.  After a CMD session ends, the history is lost (unless you install
>> some third-party tool).
>>
>> Perhaps there is a way to temporarily disable logging of command history
>> in the add-user-keycloak.sh?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Is there another way to do this?
>>>
>>> The situation is even more complicated with Docker, since running the
>>> script to change the Wildfly admin password requires restarting the
>>> server, which shuts down the container. If you have an autoscaling
>>> group, the container that gets brought up is not the container where you
>>> changed the password, but instead the original container. This seems to
>>> mean that the only way to have Keycloak run in Dockers in an autoscaling
>>> group is to bake the admin passwords into the Docker image beforehand.
>>> This isn't ideal; less so if the only way to add those passwords during
>>> build time is to run the shell script that exposes the password on the
>>> command line.
>>>
>>
>> You need to set the password once for your database. This can be done
>> prior to accessing the admin console the first time. Take a look at
>> https://github.com/jboss-dockerfiles/keycloak/blob/master/server/README.md,
>> you can use docker exec to do this.
>>
>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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