--- /dev/null
+==============================================
+Session Authentication for the Cephx Protocol
+==============================================
+Peter Reiher
+7/30/12
+
+The original Cephx protocol authenticated the client to the authenticator and set up a session
+key used to authenticate the client to the server it needs to talk to. It did not, however,
+authenticate the ongoing messages between the client and server. Based on the fact that they
+share a secret key, these ongoing session messages can be easily authenticated by using the
+key to sign the messages.
+
+This document describes changes to the code that allow such ongoing session authentication.
+The changes allow for future changes that permit other authentication protocols (and the
+existing null NONE and UNKNOWN protocols) to handle signatures, but the only protocol that
+actually does signatures, at the time of the writing, is the Cephx protocol.
+
+Introduction
+-------------
+
+This code comes into play after the Cephx protocol has completed. At this point, the client and
+server share a secret key. This key will be used for authentication. For other protocols, there
+may or may not be such a key in place, and perhaps the actual procedures used to perform
+signing will be different, so the code is written to be general.
+
+The "session" here is represented by an established pipe. For such pipes, there should be a
+``session\_security`` structure attached to the pipe. Whenever a message is to be sent on the
+pipe, code that handles the signature for this kind of session security will be called. On the
+other end of the pipe, code that checks this kind of session security's message signatures will
+be called. Messages that fail the signature check will not be processed further. That implies
+that the sender had better be in agreement with the receiver on the session security being used,
+since otherwise messages will be uniformly dropped between them.
+
+The code is also prepared to handle encryption and decryption of session messages, which would
+add secrecy to the integrity provided by the signatures. No protocol currently implemented
+encrypts the ongoing session messages, though.
+
+For this functionality to work, several steps are required. First, the sender and receiver must have
+a successful run of the cephx protocol to establish a shared key. They must store that key somewhere
+that the pipe can get at later, to permit messages to be signed with it. Sent messages must be
+signed, and received messages must have their signatures checked.
+
+The signature could be computed in a variety of ways, but currently its size is limited to 64 bits.
+A message's signature is placed in its footer, in a field called ``sig``.
+
+The signature code in Cephx can be turned on and off at runtime, using a Ceph boolean option called
+``cephx\_sign\_messages``. It is currently set to false, by default, so no messages will be signed. It
+must be changed to true to cause signatures to be calculated and checked.
+
+Storing the Key
+---------------
+
+The key is needed to create signatures on the sending end and check signatures on the receiving end.
+In the future, if asymmetric crypto is an option, it's possible that two keys (a private one for
+this end of the pipe and a public one for the other end) would need to be stored. At this time,
+messages going in both directions will be signed with the same key, so only that key needs to be
+saved.
+
+The key is saved when the pipe is established. On the client side, this happens in ``connect()``,
+which is located in ``msg/Pipe.cc``. The key is obtained from a run of the Cephx protocol,
+which results in a successfully checked authorizer structure. If there is such an authorizer
+available, the code calls ``get\_auth\_session\_handler()`` to create a new authentication session handler
+and stores it in the pipe data structure. On the server side, a similar thing is done in
+``accept()`` after the authorizer provided by the client has been verified.
+
+Once these things are done on either end of the connection, session authentication can start.
+
+These routines (``connect()`` and ``accept()``) are also used to handle situations where a new
+session is being set up. At this stage, no authorizer has been created yet, so there's no key.
+Special cases in the code that calls the signature code skip these calls when the
+``CEPH\_AUTH\_UNKNOWN`` protocol is in use. This protocol label is on the pre-authorizer
+messages in a session, indicating that negotiation on an authentication protocol is ongoing and
+thus signature is not possible. There will be a reliable authentication operation later in this
+session before anything sensitive should be passed, so this is not a security problem.
+
+Signing Messages
+----------------
+
+Messages are signed in the ``write\_message`` call located in ``msg/Pipe.cc``. The actual
+signature process is to encrypt the CRCs for the message using the shared key. Thus, we must
+defer signing until all CRCs have been computed. The header CRC is computed last, so we
+call ``sign\_message()`` as soon as we've calculated that CRC.
+
+``sign\_message()`` is a virtual function defined in ``auth/AuthSessionHandler.h``. Thus,
+a specific version of it must be written for each authentication protocol supported. Currently,
+only UNKNOWN, NONE and CEPHX are supported. So there is a separate version of ``sign\_message()`` in
+``auth/unknown/AuthUnknownSessionHandler.h``, ``auth/none/AuthNoneSessionHandler.h`` and
+``auth/cephx/CephxSessionHandler.cc``. The UNKNOWN and NONE versions simply return 0, indicating
+success.
+
+The CEPHX version is more extensive. It is found in ``auth/cephx/CephxSessionHandler.cc``.
+The first thing done is to determine if the run time option to handle signatures (see above) is on.
+If not, the Cephx version of ``sign\_message()`` simply returns success without actually calculating
+a signature or inserting it into the message.
+
+If the run time option is enabled, ``sign\_message()`` copies all of the message's CRCs (one from the
+header and three from the footer) into a buffer. It calls ``encode\_encrypt()`` on the buffer,
+using the key obtained from the pipe's ``session\_security`` structure. 64 bits of the encrypted
+result are put into the message footer's signature field and a footer flag is set to indicate that
+the message was signed. (This flag is a sanity check. It is not regarded as definitive
+evidence that the message was signed. The presence of a ``session\_security`` structure at the
+receiving end requires a signature regardless of the value of this flag.) If this all goes well,
+``sign\_message()`` returns 0. If there is a problem anywhere along the line and no signature
+was computed, it returns ``SESSION\_SIGNATURE\_FAILURE``.
+
+Checking Signatures
+-------------------
+
+The signature is checked by a routine called ``check\_message\_signature()``. This is also a
+virtual function, defined in ``auth/AuthSessionHandler.h``. So again there are specific versions
+for supported authentication protocols, such as UNKNOWN, NONE and CEPHX. Again, the UNKNOWN and
+NONE versions are stored in ``auth/unknown/AuthUnknownSessionHandler.h`` and
+``auth/none/AuthNoneSessionHandler.h``, respectively, and again they simply return 0, indicating
+success.
+
+The CEPHX version of ``check\_message\_signature()`` performs a real signature check. This routine
+(stored in ``auth/cephx/CephxSessionHandler.cc``) exits with success if the run time option has
+disabled signatures. Otherwise, it takes the CRCs from the header and footer, encrypts the result,
+and compares it to the signature stored in the footer. Since an earlier routine has checked that
+the CRCs actually match the contents of the message, it is unnecessary to recompute the CRCs
+on the raw data in the message. The encryption is performed with the same ``encode\_encrypt()``
+routine used on the sending end, using the key stored in the local ``session\_security``
+data structure.
+
+If everything checks out, the CEPHX routine returns 0, indicating succcess. If there is a
+problem, the routine returns ``SESSION\_SIGNATURE\_FAILURE``.
+
+Adding New Session Authentication Methods
+-----------------------------------------
+
+For the purpose of session authentication only (not the basic authentication of client and
+server currently performed by the Cephx protocol), in addition to adding a new protocol, that
+protocol must have a ``sign\_message()`` routine and a ``check\_message\_signature`` routine.
+These routines will take a message pointer as a parameter and return 0 on success. The procedure
+used to sign and check will be specific to the new method, but probably there will be a
+``session\_security`` structure attached to the pipe that contains a cryptographic key. This
+structure will be either an ``AuthSessionHandler`` (found in ``auth/AuthSessionHandler.h``)
+or a structure derived from that type.
+
+Adding Encryption to Sessions
+-----------------------------
+
+The existing code is partially, but not fully, set up to allow sessions to have their packets
+encrypted. Part of adding encryption would be similar to adding a new authentication method.
+But one would also need to add calls to the encryption and decryption routines in ``write\_message()``
+and ``read\_message()``. These calls would probably go near where the current calls for
+authentication are made. You should consider whether you want to replace the existing calls
+with something more general that does whatever the chosen form of session security requires,
+rather than explicitly saying ``sign`` or ``encrypt``.
+
+Session Security Statistics
+---------------------------
+
+The existing Cephx authentication code keeps statistics on how many messages were signed, how
+many message signature were checked, and how many checks succeeded and failed. It is prepared
+to keep similar statistics on encryption and decryption. These statistics can be accessed through
+the call ``printAuthSessionHandlerStats`` in ``auth/AuthSessionHandler.cc``.
+
+If new authentication or encryption methods are added, they should include code that keeps these
+statistics.
Code Review / stor4nfv.git / blobdiff