On Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:34:27 +0000 David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'd like to propose a discussion topic for the LSF: how best to implement a > common key type for use by NFS, CIFS and AFS such that, say, a kerberos key > can be encapsulated within one and then be pulled out by various filesystems. > > Furthermore, it would be necessary to allow the request_key() upcall mechanism > to perform GSSAPI queries. > I would be interested in discussing this as well. Currently CIFS "punts" to some degree and offloads almost all of the SPNEGO blob construction to userspace. So, for CIFS this would involve moving more of this code into the kernel. I think that's a good thing since it will make it easier to do mutual-authentication, etc... This would make it more plausible to store krb5 credcaches in the kernel keyring too. Modern MIT krb5 libs can do this today (I think), but most of the kernel upcalls rely on FILE: credcaches. Breaking that dependency would be nice. The difficulty here is that request_key() is "stateless", so we need to think about how to manage GSSAPI contexts across multiple upcalls...or plan to implement large swaths of the GSSAPI in-kernel. It might also be helpful to couple this with some consolidation and cleanup of the ASN.1 parsing code in the kernel. There are at least 3 separate implementations in the kernel today (one in cifs, one in sunrpc, and one in iptables). Since Trond's original email asked what I expertise I would bring to the table: I currently maintain the cifs-utils package which contains the cifs.upcall program, and wrote most of the in-kernel pieces of the current SPNEGO/krb5 upcall for CIFS. I've also done a some work on the GSSAPI upcall pieces in the RPC layer and in nfs-utils. -- Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
