[SSSD] Special HBAC rules

Dmitri Pal dpal at redhat.com
Wed Jul 28 17:10:08 UTC 2010


Hello,

On a discussion about the UI for HBAC rules it occured to me that there
is a use case that we currently do not support with IPA<->SSSD.
I do not think it will be an issue for IPAv2 and SSSD 1.5 or but down
the road probably yes. So I want to put together a good description of
the feature into a trac ticket.
But I need to ask questions first, thus this email.

The HBAC is good for the cases when a group of admins has access to the
group of the machines.
But those rules are not that good for the laptop use case.

Effectively the access to any laptop will usually be controlled by the
two logical rules:
* Allow a group of admins to access a group of the laptops - this is
handled well with HBAC rules.
* Allow the owner of the laptop to access the laptop locally and
remotely. Hm... But how to express this without creating individual
rules for every user-laptop pair?

Here is what comes to mind.
In the HBAC rule we have the concept of the hostCategory. Currently we
support only "All". But we can easily support the category "Laptop" or
"Personal Computer" to be more generic  and add a special string
attribute "hostPattern" that will contain a pattern that will allow to
match host name and the user name. By placing users and groups into such
rule we will effectively allow laptop users access to their own machines.

Here is the example:
my login name is dpal (short one) and dpal at redhat.com is long one. My
host name is dpal.laptop
So if I create an HBAC rule:

 dn: ipaUniqueID=49af8430-cbed-11dd-ad8b-0800200c9a66, cn=hbac,...
 objectClass: top
 objectClass: ipaAssociation
 objectClass: ipaHBACRule
 ipaUniqueID: 49af8430-cbed-11dd-ad8b-0800200c9a66
 accessRuleType: allow
 memberUser: cn=dpal,cn=users,cn=accounts,...
 memberUser: cn=sgallagh,cn=users,cn=accounts,...
 memberUser: cn=ssorce,cn=users,cn=accounts,...
 memberUser: cn=ssbose,cn=users,cn=accounts,...
 memberUser: cn=Brnodev,cn=groups,cn=accounts,...
 memberService: cn=ssh,cn=hbacservices,cn=accounts,...
 hostCategory: laptop
 hostPattern: %short%.laptop
 ...

This rule grants individual users listed above and Brno developers access to the machines who's name starts with the short name of user and has suffix ".laptop".

The only drawback is that the admins would have to use some kind of pattern for the personal machine names derived from the user name. IMO this is a reasonable suggestion for those who want to start to control access via HBAC rules,
Potentially we can support several patterns in one HBAC rule if there different naming conventions due to acquisitions and other historical reasons.

Thoughts?

 




-- 
Thank you,
Dmitri Pal

Engineering Manager IPA project,
Red Hat Inc.


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