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Ralf - 

Keystone supports this by having an internal API that allows you to write your own authentication backend for the various components. For this sort of use, I'd recommend writing your own backend for Identity that interacts with and translates from the back-end systems you're interested in using.

Chris Hoge at U Oregon did something very much like this with the UOregon SSO system (I heard about it at OSCON this past July). 

The relevant internal API for Identity is documented in http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/keystone.identity.html#module-keystone.identity.core, and you can read the backends that implement that set of methods in keystone/identity/backends - kvs.py, sql.py, etc.

- joe

On Sep 25, 2012, at 2:20 AM, Ralf Haferkamp <rhafer at suse.de> wrote:
> I've been thinking about adding support for External Authentication to
> keystone. By "External Authentication" I mean that e.g. when I run keystone
> behind apache it would be nice if I could just let apache handle the
> authentication (via mod_auth_kerb for example) and have keystone issue a Token
> based on the information that apache provides about the authenticated user
> (e.g. the username is usually passed via the REMOTE_USER env variable).
> 
> I am currently wondering how the client should indicate to the server that
> External Auth should be used? One could add another parameter to the JSON doc
> that's POSTed during keystone authentication instead of the username/password
> tuple, but is that really needed or should keystone just check of the presence
> of specific ENV variables (e.g. REMOTE_USER as set by apache2) when external
> auth is enabled. In my current prototype implementation I do just that. What
> would be the preferable approach here?
> 
> BTW, has anybody else been working on this already? Does this even sound like a
> feature worth adding?
> 
> -- 
> regards,
>    Ralf
> 
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