[keycloak-user] Securely setting admin passwords

Tue Feb 23 04:03:30 EST 2016

I think the best approach is to add keycloak-user.json. Even if we provide
some sorta of public key encryption for protecting passwords, at some point
would be mandatory for automation scripts to be prompted for the admin's
password.

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 3:19 AM Stian Thorgersen <sthorger at redhat.com>
wrote:

> If you have suggestions to changes/additions we can do to make it more
> secure feel free to let us now
>
> On 22 February 2016 at 16:32, Aikeaguinea <aikeaguinea at xsmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We're essentially doing this. Since we need to secure the Wildfly admin
>> password as well, we are basically running the add-user.sh scripts to
>> generate the keycloak-user.json and mgmt-users.properties before running
>> the Docker script, and then adding them to the image. This has the
>> disadvantage of baking the passwords into the image, but at least
>> they're encrypted and the image is stored in a secure repository, which
>> is probably as good as we're going to get.
>>
>>
>>
>> From: <keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org> on behalf of Bill Burke
>> <bburke at redhat.com>
>> Date: Monday, February 22, 2016 at 10:21 AM
>> To: "keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org" <keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org>
>> Subject: Re: [keycloak-user] Securely setting admin passwords
>>
>> I'm too lazy to read this entire thread, sorry if somebody already
>> suggested this, but can't you
>>
>> 1) Create a minimal realm in your local environment and export the realm
>> to json.
>> 2) Import this json in your Docker script?
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/22/2016 10:10 AM, Aikeaguinea wrote:
>> With regard to Docker, things get more complicated. I believe it's not
>> just the bash history but the Docker history itself that stores the
>> commands.
>>
>> Also, per one of the messages earlier on this chain, it is not advised
>> to put secrets into Docker environment variables. These are accessible
>> in many different ways.
>>
>> From: <keycloak-user-bounces at lists.jboss.org> on behalf of Stan Silvert
>> <ssilvert at redhat.com>
>> Date: Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 12:26 PM
>> To: "stian at redhat.com" <stian at redhat.com>
>> Cc: Stian Thorgersen <sthorger at redhat.com>, keycloak-user
>> <keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org>
>> Subject: Re: [keycloak-user] Securely setting admin passwords
>>
>> On 2/18/2016 12:14 PM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>> It's security vs usability as usual. Allowing passing the password
>> directly is convenient for developers, for Docker image, for
>> provisioning tools, etc.. So we're not going to remove that it's
>> required, but I do appreciate that if not used correctly it's a
>> potential security risk. The worst case scenario here is really that
>> someone gets an admins favorite password, as someone that has access to
>> getting the bash history of that particular user will also be able to
>> run the add-user script themselves. So if the admin wants to print his
>> favorite password in clear text in the bash history we should not stop
>> him.
>>
>> It's not our responsibility to clear the bash history, so we should not
>> do that either.
>> If there is a way to stop that one command from being saved in the bash
>> history then we should do it.
>>
>> At the very least, we should print a warning message to let the
>> administrator know he has done something that is potentially insecure.
>>
>>
>> On 18 February 2016 at 16:53, Bruno Oliveira <bruno at abstractj.org>
>> wrote:
>> It's about balance. I'm not arguing here against it, I just don't see
>> how it could strengthen security. Nothing will stop people to get their
>> own gun and automate it with stdin :)
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:45 PM Stan Silvert <ssilvert at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>> On 2/18/2016 9:29 AM, Bruno Oliveira wrote:
>> 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.
>> I agree with you there.  In that case you are doing something extra to
>> shoot yourself in the foot.  We can't guard against that.
>>
>> We just shouldn't put the gun in your hand.
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.fastmail.com - Access your email from home and the web
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.orghttps://
>> lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.fastmail.com - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.orghttps://
>> lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>> --
>> Bill Burke
>> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
>> http://bill.burkecentral.com
>>
>> --
>> http://www.fastmail.com - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
>>                           love email again
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> keycloak-user mailing list
>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> keycloak-user mailing list
> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/keycloak-user/attachments/20160223/9ac228c3/attachment-0001.html 