freeipa/install/html/hbac-deny-remove.html
Adam Young e4a444ba81 HBAC deny warning
shows dialog if there are any HBAC deny rules.  Dialog provides option to navigate to the HBAC page.  Deny rules have their rule type value show up in red.

Only shows up fro administrators, not for self service users.

https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/1421
2011-07-06 21:52:00 +00:00

83 lines
3.7 KiB
HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>IPA: Identity Policy Audit</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../ui/jquery.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../ui/jquery-ui.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ipa_error.css" />
</head>
<body id="header-bg">
<div class="container_1">
<div class="header-logo">
<img src="../ui/ipalogo.png" />
</div>
<div class="textblockkrb">
<h1>Removal of HBAC Deny Rules.</h1>
<p>FreeIPA has dropped support for DENY rules from the HBAC
specification. </p>
<p>The former design of HBAC specifies that<p>
<ol>
<li> If no ALLOW rules match, access is denied</li>
<li> If one or more ALLOW rules match and no DENY rules match,
access is allowed</li>
<li>If one or more DENY rules match, access is denied</li>
</ol>
<p>Thus, DENY rules exist only to provide exceptions from the ALLOW
rules. There exists no ALLOW+DENY combination that cannot be
constructed from ALLOW rules only.[1]</P>
<p>DENY rules introduce a lot of edge-cases for evaluation. The most
important of which is the availability of the group membership for
the user logging in. Depending on the mechanism used to log in (for
example, GSSAPI over SSH or cross-realm Kerberos trust where the
user is provided by the PAC), SSSD's cache may not have a complete
list of groups for this user. If the login is occurring during
offline mode (where SSSD cannot contact the LDAP server to refresh
the user's groups), SSSD cannot determine whether DENY rules would
match for the user. This therefore translates into a potential
security issue.</p>
<p>We implemented a workaround in the SSSD evaluator to resolve this by
guaranteeing that we do a full lookup of all groups referenced by
rules while we are retrieving the rules from FreeIPA. However, this
requires at least one additional lookup against the LDAP server
(possibly many if there is need to resolve nestings). This results
in a significantly slower login while online.</p>
<p>We also have issues related to source host evaluation. Some
applications will provide an IP address instead of a hostname in the
pam_rhost attribute. Our only recourse here is to perform a
reverse-DNS lookup to try and identify the real hostname(s) of the
server. However, in many real-world environments, reverse DNS is
unavailable or misconfigured. In the case of ALLOW rules, this would
lead to a match failure and an implicit denial. However, a failure
to properly match a DENY rule can result in unexpected access being
granted. This is a potentially serious security issue.</p>
<p>Given these edge cases (and performance issues of the noted
workaround), The FreeIPA team decided to drop DENY rules from the
HBAC specification and limit HBAC only to ALLOW rules (which are
much safer). Beyond the obvious advantages for our implementation,
this should make it less complex for users to write their rules.</p>
<p>[1] Some rules are complex to simulate, such as "Allow access from
all PAM services EXCEPT telnet". But a safer and clearer
implementation approach does all access via whitelist. If a FreeIPA
implementation is using an exception rule, the administrators
should re-evaluate the justification.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>