Open Stack

Aaron,

I'd be interested in hearing more about what you are doing.  As you know, VOMS is a general method of supplying virtual organization membership attributes (e.g., groups, roles, etc.) as a web service. One method of doing this is in the form of extended attribute certificates, which can be fitted into any PKI or Kerberos-based workflow in principle. Other methods to make use of VOMS information may exist through portals and other related methods of accessing the features of the stored attributes through web services calls.

The more general question you are asking, though, is about Auth plugins and interfacing external auth. I know several user communities that are completely committed to use of strong authentication and for which a well-designed set of interfaces that can support this are required items. One doesn't want to lose generality in producing such interfaces, though, so I would be interested in seeing how the openStack community is responding to the design topics for this aspect of authN/authZ integration.

Alan

On May 7, 2013, at 12:52 PM, Aaron Knister <aaron.knister at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I'm looking for feedback and input about what other sites are doing for authentication and authorization with OpenStack.
> 
> First, some background:
> 
> I'm currently evaluating OpenStack (Grizzly), specifically working on integration with Active Directory. I'm unable to modify the schema to allow groupOfNames as a SUP of organizationalRole so I've implemented a workaround using openldap and several of its overlays backends to sit in front of AD. That all works just fine, however I really would like to be able to map AD groups to roles/tenants. I suspect I'll end up writing some code to do this-- shouldn't be too hard. 
> 
> Also on the subject of Active Directory, it's a show stopper for me to put un-encrypted AD credentials in environment variables to then pass to the various openstack CLI progs. My ideal workaround would be to use Kerberos authentication which I actually have working. I setup keystone to run under apache based on this documentation with some tweaks here and there: 
> 
> http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/external-auth.html
> 
> I created an openstack client auth plugin (based on the VOMS auth plugin) using requests_kerberos and this works well with the nova client, however none of the other client tools, including horizon, seem to support authentication plugins or the external authentication concept in general.
> 
> So, here are my questions:
> 
> - How have other folks handled integration of OpenStack with existing authN/authZ infrastructures? I'm particularly interested in the automatic mapping of existing LDAP groups to roles/tenants within openstack.
> - Are there plans to add support for the auth plugins to the *client modules and CLI tools going forward? I'd be interested in contributing this if it's on the roadmap and hasn't been done yet.
> - Are there plans to add support for auth plugins/external au th to Horizon? As above, I'm interested in implementing this if there's interest.
> - I see vague references in the documentation/*client code to using certificates for authentication (without the need for httpd external authentication) which would also eliminate the credentials-in-environment-variables issue. Is using PKI for authentication going to be supported? If so what's the status?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> -Aaron
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