From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 07:39:20 +0200 From: Lucio De Re To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: [9fans] INIT and AUTH - Was: X11 on 3rd Edition Message-ID: <20000724073919.D16059@cackle.proxima.alt.za> References: <200007240404.AAA22184@cse.psu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <200007240404.AAA22184@cse.psu.edu>; from Russ Cox on Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 12:03:43AM -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: e9b4a130-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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