Open Stack

Hello David,

We are definitely assessing the option, although even switching Keystone
to be backed by an LDAP service might also work, and not be a switch to
a fully federated system. I believe Keystone has had LDAP support since
Havana, and that was an option we had looked at. It also might be a
terrible option, we don't know yet, and would still mean dealing with
LDAP directly anyway for user management.

What seems weird though with a federated Keystone system though is that
you still have to store role and group information in Keystone so that
has to be propagate through somehow, or be automated in some way still
via an external service.

We don't at present have any concrete plans, and until now a pressing
need to do so hasn't come up, although there were always plans to.

As for the VO roles blueprint, how likely is that to be merged into
master, and are there any implementations of it? I assume the VO
entities mentioned in the proposal would be in Keystone, yes?

We need a solution in the next few months (ideally sooner), but while
building a quick hack of a service along Keystone could likely be done
quickly.

Cheers,
-Adrian

On 15/01/15 21:20, David Chadwick wrote:
> Hi Adrian
> 
> Morgan is right in saying that an external IdP would solve many of your
> user management problems, but then of course, you will be using
> federated keystone  which you seem reluctant to do :-) However, if you
> have an IdP under your full control then you can allow users to self
> register and reset their passwords.
> 
> The next problem you will then face, is user authorisation - as opposed
> to user authentication. The VO roles blueprint that we have worked on
> addresses the authorisation problem. So when you are ready for this, let
> me know
> 
> regards
> 
> David
> 
> On 15/01/2015 00:42, Morgan Fainberg wrote:
>>>
>>> On Jan 13, 2015, at 9:06 PM, Adrian Turjak <adriant at catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello openstack-dev,
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if there is any interest or need for an open-source user
>>> registration and management service for people using OpenStack.
>>>
>>> We're currently at a point where we need a way for users to sign up
>>> themselves, choose their own password, and request new users to be added
>>> to their project. There doesn't seem to be anything out there, and most
>>> vendors seem to have built their own systems to handle this or even
>>> their own dashboard systems that do.
>>>
>>> Horizon is built around the client tools, and your own personal token,
>>> so it can't handle creating new users. Plus Keystone doesn't really have
>>> any good way of handling temporary (unapproved) users and projects.
>>>
>>> The suggested approach seems to be to build a service to sit along
>>> Keystone, have it's own admin creds so it can create new users, and also
>>> store temp user data locally until the user is approved.
>>>
>>> Unless we can find a suitable solution for us quickly, we're likely to
>>> be developing such a service. It would ideally have a pluggable approval
>>> workflow, allowing new user requests, new project requests, creation of
>>> clients in external client database/ERP systems. Plus it would have a
>>> password reset-token system for having new users supply their password
>>> once they are approved, which would also allow existing users to request
>>> password resets.
>>>
>>> Part of our requirements are easy to integrate into Horizon, fitting
>>> neatly into the OpenStack ecosystem along other services, and being easy
>>> to update/alter once we have hierarchical multi-tenancy and if it makes
>>> some things easier.
>>>
>>> I've written up a proposal to help us define our requirements, and a
>>> copy of that is attached, and on etherpad:
>>> https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/User_Management_Service
>>>
>>> Plus I've attached a couple of diagrams, which are sadly not UML, but
>>> should give you some idea of two of the primary use cases.
>>>
>>> Is this useful to anyone? Is this entirely the wrong approach? If it is
>>> a useful service is there any interest in collaboration?
>>>
>>> Thanks for any feedback.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> -Adrian Turjak
>>
>> I have an alternative recommendation (rather than using Keystone’s API and user-management). Keystone’s user management is lacking a lot of features a full fledged IDP (identity provider) would have. “Password reset”, “password complexity”, “password reuse”, failed login locking, etc. I would recommend that you implement this service to write to a full featured IDP (LDAP, FreeIPA, Active Directory, etc) and have Keystone hook into that more-full featured IDP. You might even find that the IDP selected has a lot of these features built-in (and/or could be fronted in a horizon panel).
>>
>> This recommendation comes from past experience implementing almost exactly this feature (and having it go through a number of incarnations). The benefits of using a full-fledged IDP outweigh the ease of using the Keystone API to manage users, especially since there is non-trivial engineering that will go into the project.
>>
>> You could also utilize an IDP that can issue SAML assertions and go with a Federated Identity setup for Keystone. Again your tool could work with an IDP that has a better set of features that Keystone’s current build-in identity (user/group) store does.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Morgan
>>
>>
>>
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