[cifs-utils PATCHv2 0/6] cifs.upcall: cleanup and overhaul of the cifs.upcall krb5 handling code

[Jeff Layton]

On Thu, 2016-08-25 at 22:59 +0300, Isaac Boukris wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>
> wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 2016-08-25 at 19:05 +0300, Isaac Boukris wrote:
> > > 
> > > However, it gets more complicated when it comes to SPNEGO.
> > > First, when I call gss_init_sec_context with SPNEGO mech it will
> > > always return GSS_S_CONTINUE_NEEDED as it need server response in
> > > order to complete (even if mutual auth is not requested).
> > > This causes (I think) the call to gss_inquire_sec_context_by_oid
> > > to
> > > fail.
> > > Also, we need to support continuation anyway for mutual auth and
> > > NTLM
> > > fallback.
> > > 
> > 
> > Ahh that's interesting. I didn't realize we'd be stuck having to
> > handle
> > a multi-stage negotiation if we use gss_init_sec_context. That is
> > sort
> > of difficult to handle with the way the upcall currently works.
> > 
> > I may still play with it just to verify that I understand what
> > you're
> > saying but it does make sense.
> 
> 
> You may take look at my (dirty) draft:
> https://github.com/frenche/cifs-utils/tree/gssapi_upcall
> 

Neat. Do you have a companion kernel patch? I'm wondering about how to
handle backward compatibility there. I guess we could try SPNEGO first
and fall back to using the *KRB5 if that fails.

Another thing (not directly related) that I've been considering is
whether we can use anonymous krb5 creds to handle the initial mount for
sec=krb5 mounts. It would be nice to be able to do multiuser mounts
without any client side setup.

> > 
> > If we're going to go down the road of changing the upcall to handle
> > that then I think I'd prefer to just change cifs.ko over to use
> > gssproxy directly, like knfsd already does.
> > 
> > It would be one less special snowflake to deal with and most of the
> > plumbing is already in place. We could leave the old upcall in
> > place
> > for legacy userland case, and only do it if the gssproxy
> > negotiation
> > failed. It's a bit of a project, but would be totally doable.
> 
> 
> The cifs kernel module will need some changes anyway to handle
> multi-stage negotiation I think.
> Using gssproxy sounds like an excellent idea, though I'm only vaguely
> familiar with it so I'll have to look it up.
> 
> On the other hand I think there may still be an interest for
> stateless
> mechanism (alongside) which wouldn't require a running daemon.
> I'm trying to think of an alternative to exporting the gss context,
> perhaps by keeping the upcall process running and continuing the
> conversation with the kernel module somehow.
> 

Yeah, not having a running daemon is certainly simpler for users. 

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>