[9fans] INIT and AUTH - Was: X11 on 3rd Edition

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 12:03:43AM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> 
> The VNC client we have will be in the next update,
> which should happen somewhat soon.
> 
I noticed that there were two changes to /sys/src/cmd/init.c, one to
allow for sysname() as a function, and the other commenting out the
pass() function call.  The former affected - incorrectly, in my
opinion - the name of the environment?device entry by name "sysname",
because of the global search and replacement, the latter I could not
understand, but I restored the call in my particular instance, to give
me 2ed-style behaviour in a CPU server.

Care to include a fix for this in the next update?

And is there a godd reason to keep the "pass()" call out of the way?

Another difference I noticed between 2ed and 3ed is the fact that most
services on a CPU server now run as "none".  As mentioned, that is a
useful security precaution, and would be usefully documented for the
services involved.  Presumably, something along these lines is
happening: if the service is found in /rc/bin/service, it is run under
id "none", if in /rc/bin/service.auth (and elsewhere?), the host id is
used.

On an authentication server (I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of
those dance steps, I think) it would be possible to specify arbitrary
owner ids for services, within the authority granted to the host by
the /lib/ndb/auth file.

Here, I think I start getting confused: who looks at /lib/ndb/auth?
And where there's more than one, which one is used?  I would suggest,
unless I'm missing the point, that there ought to be a single point of
such authority, at least for a single authentication domain.  Is this
at all possible to implement securely?  It would certainly be a bit of
a chicken-and-egg situation where the /lib/ndb/auth file would define
the authentication domain as well as the authentication proxy it
accepted, but additional /lib/ndb/auth files could throw this totally.
I presume Kerberos has some mechanism to resolve this issue?

(Sorry, I'm just an aspiring security consultant, the deeper I dig,
the smaller my field of competence seems to become.)

++L