[security-dev] PicketLink Capabilities - Authentication

[Darran Lofthouse]

Hello Bill,

On 11/29/2012 03:35 PM, Bill Burke wrote:
>
>
> On 11/29/2012 6:13 AM, Darran Lofthouse wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Just looking at how I could make use of PicketLink withing AS7 and have
>> a couple of questions.
>>
>> For Digest based authentication mechanisms I see there is some initial
>> support but I have a couple more requirements I will raise separately.
>>
>> The next area I am looking into is SSL and Client Cert style
>> authentication - a couple of things I am interested in here is - is
>> there a capability to take a certificate, validate it and then return
>> the identity of the user from that certificate?  i.e. I am not looking
>> to load the user first and then validate the certificate.
>
> Its pretty simple to write.  I'll be writing LoginModule to support this
> very soon (HTTPS only).  You just want cert validation right?  Do you
> need access to the cert?  Or can you just get the principal String name?

Whilst it is possible in most situations to identify a name from the 
certificate what I would like is to eliminate this if it is not strictly 
necessary.

So at the connection level trust would have already been established on 
the connection as that negotiation process would have included 
verification with a X509TrustStore but then to identify the User I just 
want to pass in the Certificate and have the user returned - or 
something along those lines.

>> Secondly in this area could it be conceivable to implement a
>> X509TrustStore that is backed by PicketLink?  If we could obtain all
>> validate certificates or the certificate of a CA we could create
>> somethign in advance but I am interested in if we could have something
>> more dynamic.
>>
>
> At least for HTTPS, I've found that JBossWeb does the validation of the
> client-cert if you provide it a truststore.

Yes that is the scenario I am looking into but rather than providing a 
file based truststore I want to be creating a SSLContext instance that 
is initialised using a X509TrustStore that is in turn backed by PicketLink.

>> Following on from this I have one more case that I am not sure if it
>> would fit within an IDM or if we would handle it outside first and only
>> access the IDM once we have verified the user and that is GSSAPI/SPNEGO
>> style authentication.  In this case we receive one or more tokens from a
>> user and send one or more challenges back to the user - at the end of
>> this authentication process we know the identity of the user.
>>
>
> I'm doing a bunch of work with OAuth and bearer tokens with the ability
> to throw in client-certs as an extra auth mechanism.
>
> http://bill.burkecentral.com/2012/11/21/scoping-out-resteasy-skeleton-key-security/
>
> I should have a prototype up by christmas.
>
>
>> Also interested in knowing if anyone else has other authentication
>> scenarios identified where all we may have is the 'Credential' and the
>> user is not identified until after this has been verified.
>>
>
> Yes, I have this problem as well.  I want a bearer token that can travel
> and be forwarded to multiple endpoints, be verified through PKI, have
> all the role grants within the token, and have the identity of the
> caller verfied through client-cert validation.  This allows services to
> be totally stateless with regards to security metadata/identity and to
> receive permissions per-request.  All they need is a truststore.
>
> Granted this is HTTP only, but I've prototyped it already:

That does sound similar, also similar to something else we are working 
on within AS so thanks for the link I will take a closer look.

> https://github.com/patriot1burke/Resteasy/tree/master/jaxrs/security/skeleton-key-idm
>
> Bill