Re: Adding security considerations text to draft-ietf-kitten-gssapi-domain-based-names

Tom Yu <tlyu@MIT.EDU> Thu, 04 January 2007 01:46 UTC

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To: Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@mit.edu>
References: <tsltzz7gabj.fsf@cz.mit.edu>
From: Tom Yu <tlyu@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2007 20:46:00 -0500
In-Reply-To: <tsltzz7gabj.fsf@cz.mit.edu> (Sam Hartman's message of "Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:49:20 -0500")
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Subject: Re: Adding security considerations text to draft-ietf-kitten-gssapi-domain-based-names
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An alternative which I prefer is the following:

  "With all service names, the mere existence of service name conveys
  meaningful information that may be used by initiators for making
  authorization decisions.  Domain-based service names make stronger
  authorization assertions than do simple host-based service names;
  therefore, administrators of distributed authentication services
  should be aware of the significance of the service names for which
  they create acceptor credentials."

I think it makes somewhat more clear that there is a qualitative
change in the responsibilities of the administrators of the
authentication infrastructure when domain-based service names become
deployed.

Quoting some prior private discussion:

>>>>> "Sam" == Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@MIT.EDU> writes:

Sam> Today MIT is very happy to hand out host, rvdsrv (don't ask),
Sam> daemon , discuss and a few other principals to anyone who can
Sam> demonstrate that they run a host.  The assumption is that having
Sam> such a principal doesn't say anything about the overall mit.edu
Sam> namespace; it is simply a service running on that host.

Sam> The first time you introduce a service whose clients expect the
Sam> service to be domain-wide, you need to make a new decision when
Sam> handing out a a key: is this principal allowed to speak for the
Sam> entire namespace.  It may be the case that ldap in current client
Sam> implementations actually already works this way even without the
Sam> domain based names draft.  But host and a number of other
Sam> services definitely do not.  The first time you add a domain
Sam> based service, you take on a new responsibility in namespace
Sam> management.  Previously you needed to ask whether you were giving
Sam> a key to the person responsible for the machine on which it runs.
Sam> You still need to ask that, but you also need to ask whether that
Sam> machine is allowed to represent the entire domain.

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