On 8/18/2021 12:51 PM, Steve French wrote:
On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 11:29 AM ronnie sahlberg
<ronniesahlberg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 11:18 PM Tom Talpey <tom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/18/2021 12:10 AM, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
Steve,
We depend on ARC4 for generating the encrypted session key in key exchange.
This patch disables the key exchange/encrypted session key for ntlmssp
IF the kernel does not have any ARC4 support.
This allows to build the cifs module even if ARC4 has been removed
though with a weaker type of NTLMSSP support.
It's a good goal but it seems wrong to downgrade the security
so silently. Wouldn't it be a better approach to select ARC4,
and thereby force the build to succeed or fail? Alternatively,
change the #ifndef ARC4 to a positive option named (for example)
DOWNGRADED_NTLMSSP or something equally foreboding?
Good point.
Maybe we should drop this patch and instead copy ARC4 into fs/cifs
so we have a private version of the code in cifs.ko.
And do the same for md4 and md5.
Copying such code makes me uneasy. It's going to confuse everyone
who tries to turn off one and misses the other. To say nothing of
the risk of testing and addressing bugs.
BTW, are we sure that servers even work if the client selects
something other than ARC4, or whatever?
Tom.
Yes ... and allow a build option where ARC4/MD4 are removed from the
build and NTLMSSP disabled,
forcing kerberos in the short term, and then we need to get working
ASAP on adding some choices in the future,
perhaps something similar to
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/jj852232(v=ws.11)
where Windows allows plugging in additional auth mechanisms to SPNEGO
(and pick at least one new mechanism beyond
KRB5 to support in the kernel client ...)
