iwhd security

Pete Zaitcev zaitcev at redhat.com
Wed Sep 14 18:08:03 UTC 2011


In its present form iwhd has no access controls whatsoever, and it
concerns me. The memcached is like that too, and it is deployed successfully
on many high-traffic, high-profile sites. However, iwhd implies remote
access, which makes the current set-up more hazardous. I would like to
consider options from an attack by rooted systems on the internal
networks, and less privileged insiders.

A short while ago, there was some effort to underpin the whole cloud
with IPA. From that time, a patch exists for iwhd, which implements
Kerberos authentication. There is no authorization in it, however:
anyone who is able to authenticate with Kerberos is considered
authorized. I'm wondering if adding this to mainline iwhd would
help anything. Do Conductor and Factory have an HTTP-Negotiate
client support?

Failing that, I'd like to know if anyone has any suggestions or
requests. For example, would adding an HTTP-Basic (over SSL or not)
help anything?

-- Pete


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