Oracle kerberos authentication service canonicalization - oracle

I have a nodejs application using kerberos to authenticate to two separate services. One is an Oracle database & the second is an HTTP api. When connecting to each of these services independently, kerberos authentication is successful.
The problem comes when attempting to connect to both in a single process. The web API's service name is a load balanced CNAME. Once the database connection is set up, all subsequent kerberos requests for tickets use DNS canonicalization on the clientside prior to negotiating a ticket for any service, despite setting rdns=false in the kerberos configuration.
[libdefaults]
rdns=false
This causes all attempts to access the web api to fail.
Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information: Server not found in Kerberos database
I am explicitly pointing oracle (via sqlnet.ora) to use the kerberos configuration containing the above libdefaults section. I'm a little lost on what to consider next, does anyone know if its possible to tell oracle to not do DNS canonicalization for kerberos auth?

Related

Does Powershell's -UseDefaultCredentials use Kerberos?

In Azure DevOps services, when you connect an agent to the server, you have different types of ways to authenticate to the server. You can see here for example, about connecting a Linux agent, that you have these 4 types:
Alternate (Basic authentication)
PAT
Negotiate - Connect as a user other than the signed-in user via a scheme such as Kerberos or NTLM.
Integrated - Not supported in Linux
The integrated type is mentioned in the page about connecting a Windows agent as "Windows default credentials"
Bare with me please.
In my organization, we have a Active Directory domain with a Single-Sign-On, I suppose it uses Kerberos as the authentication protocol. Sometimes I use Powershell scripts to access the API of our internal Azure DevOps Server, and I use the -UseDefaultCredentials flag so the user won't have to enter username and password - it will just authenticate based on the logged-in user.
That got me thinking that the -UseDefaultCredentials flag is using Kerberos to authenticate.
But from the above, it seems that Integrated is using "Default credentials", which is something else than "Negotiate" which uses Kerberos.
Can someone help me understand this?
The UseDefaultCredentials flag tells the underlying system to try and use the caller's SSO credentials, which in most cases is the credential used to log into the system interactively or otherwise.
Strictly speaking it does not indicate which protocol to use. What it's actually saying is "dear system internals: please figure it out for me". The way this works is by selecting the negotiate protocol, which as it's name suggests negotiates the use of specific authentication protocols based on the client credentials as well as information from the server. This is called the SPNEGO protocol. It is transparent to the caller.
SPNEGO is fairly simple in nature. The client has a list of known authentication protocols (Kerberos, NTLM, etc.) and will send that list to the server saying 'pick one please'. The server can select any of them and respond telling them what to use, and the client then goes and uses it. Fin.
SPNEGO is also relatively smart because it can reasonably predict what it thinks the server will accept and will attempt to optimistically provide a token up front using the first protocol in the list. So if it thinks it needs Kerberos it'll go and get a Kerberos ticket up front and send it first. The server might think that's fine, or it might fail and return a response saying
"no, I really need NTLM", and so the client tries again with NTLM.

In OAuth2 flow, can we delegate authentication to Windows SSO

We have an in-house OAuth2 server used by our applications. Now we want to use Windows SSO for our applications but without them to change anything: they'll still reach our OAuth2 server for an access token and the authentication part will be delegated to Kerberos (which Windows use, if I understood properly).
Is there a way to do that?
That is a standard setup and should just require configuration changes in the Authorization Server (AS) - with zero code changes in applications.
Most commonly:
The AS might be hosted in the cloud
It will redirect browsers to an on premise Identity Provider (IDP)
The IDP can connect to Active Directory
You may also need a fallback option for when users are not joined to the work domain. See this Curity guide for an example and some infrastructure factors to think about.
If the AS is in house it may even be able to make a direct Kerberos connection via an LDAP data source, though the preferred architecture is a separate IDP.
Of course you need an AS that supports the ability to make this type of connection, so would need to check the vendor docs.
REQUEST FLOW
Kerberos has always been the simplest protocol conceptually but the deepest to understand - here is a bit of a summary:
Your apps will make a standard OpenID Connect authorization redirect to the AS
The AS may then present an authentication selection screen to the user, unless there is only a single option
Alternatively an app can send the acr_values query parameter to say which authentication method to use
The AS will then redirect the browser to the next stage of processing, that uses a 'Windows SSO authenticator'
The redirect to the Windows SSO authenticator does not have to use OpenID Connect - it could be any vendor specific HTTP request
The browser will send an encrypted Kerberos ticket automatically by connecting to AD - a prerequisite for this to work might be that the domain in the URL is in the Local Intranet zone on end user computers
The Windows SSO authenticator will need to be able to decrypt this credential, which typically requires a Service Principal Name to be configured
Once the Kerberos ticket is decrypted, the authenticator will make an LDAP connection to an Active Directory data source via its standard LDAP endpoints, to verify the received ticket

Authenticate Nifi using OpenID Connect using API

I am new to OpenID connect & security domain. I have configured Nifi to use OpenID for authentication using online documentation. And to automate a few nifi related tasks we are using nipyapi.
I have already written python code which does automated flow deployment for basic nifi installation (unsecured & without user authentication)
Now, I have to move the code to secured Nifi installation. How to authenticate to OpenID connect using nipyapi/rest API ?
AS per discussion with Bryan, i am planning to use client certificate for authentication but it started giving authorization error. and have created another question with the details.
Nifi - Client Certificate Authorization Error
OpenID Connect generally requires that you follow a flow of re-directs, typically in the browser. NiFi re-directs you to the login page of the OIDC provider, upon completion, the OIDC provider redirects you back to NiFi. I'm not exactly sure how, or if you even can, perform this login process from scripts. An easy alternative would be to just generate a client certificate to represent an automation user for any NiPyApi scripts. Client certificate authentication is always enabled by default for NiFi.

Oracle database authentication using kerberos and AD

We are in the planning phase of configuring our soon-to-be-upgraded databases (19c) to authenticate directly against AD (no oracle proxy). I have read a handful of documents from Oracle on how to do this. Most of the documentation focuses around using passwords (password filter/verifier). The only problem is that our AD administrators are dead-set against implementing Oracle's password filter into our existing AD infrastructure. That being said, one of the security guys said we could implement the oracle authentication using Kerberos instead. From what I have read, and the documents are scattered all over the place, and nothing that detailed, to use Kerberos:
1) The client no longer uses a username/password - they connect using a wallet-style connection (e.g. /#dbname)
2) Not only does the Oracle DB need some configuration changes, but so does every client that plans on using Kerberos
I don't know anything about Kerberos, how it works, and what goes on when you implement this, but I was hoping for, at the end of this is:
1) No client changes/installs (only the oracle DB would have config changes)
The user will continue to provide credentials as before - completely transparent
2) No need for the password filter as our admins have a "beef" against it
So my question is:
If using Kerberos directly against AD on >=18c:
1) Does the client user still provide a username and password to authenticate against AD, or does the client simply get "accepted" due to the tickets/tokens/configuration that occurs on the client (i.e. the client is simply trusted)?
2) Is there client config changes that need to occur, or does the client reach out to the DB and the DB, with its config changes, does all the legwork to authenticate against AD based off of client info being passed
3) Does any additional manual component need to occur on occasion (periodically retrieving a ticket/token/something) (because, say, it expires)
So in the end, we want to have complete transparency with every client and using something other than the password verifier with AD.
Thanks in advance.
-Jim
It sounds like you want to authenticate Windows clients against an Oracle database over a network using Active Directory without making any client changes.
This is pretty open-ended and complex StackOverflow question.
Probably you've been reading the docs about Third Party Network Authentication using Oracle Advanced Security. You can use Kerberos, SSL, RADIUS, PKI, etc. For most of these options, you need to do some setup on the client, because both the Oracle client and server need to authenticate or verify with the third-party system.
I think you need Enterprise User Security (using Oracle Internet Directory). Assuming you go with password-based authentication, you don't need client changes. In this scenario, Oracle Internet Directory can synchronize its user directory with AD, so your users can use their same username/password. However, when they change their AD password, they'll need to change their Oracle password separately.
On a different note, you may be able to alleviate your AD admins' fears about Oracle password complexity requirements, since you can change or remove those to fit your AD requirements.

Forward SPNEGO Credentials to Secure Cluster

I have a cluster secured by Kerberos, and have a REST API that needs to interact with the cluster on behalf of the user. I have used Spring Security with SPNEGO to authenticate the user, but when I try to use the Hadoop SDK, it fails for various reasons based on what I try.
When I try to use the SDK directly after the user logs in, it gives me SIMPLE authentication is not enabled.
I have noticed the session's Authenticator is UserNamePasswordAuthenticationToken which does not make sense, since I'm authenticating against the Kerberos realm with the credentials from the user.
I am trying to use this project out of the box with my own service account and keytab: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security-kerberos/tree/master/spring-security-kerberos-samples/sec-server-spnego-form-auth
For what it's worth, you can leverage Apache Knox (http://knox.apache.org) to consume the Hadoop REST APIs in a secured cluster. Knox will take care of the SPNEGO negotiation with the various components for you. You could use the HTTP header based pre-auth SSO provider to propagate the identity of your enduser to Knox.
Details: http://knox.apache.org/books/knox-0-8-0/user-guide.html#Preauthenticated+SSO+Provider
You will need to ensure that only trusted clients can call your service if you are using that provider however.
Alternatively, you can authenticate to Knox against LDAP with username/password with the default Shiro provider.
One of the great benefits of using Knox this way is that your service never needs to know anything about whether the cluster is kerberized. Knox abstracts that from you.
First of all, Spring Sec Kerberos Extension is a terrible piece of code. I have evaluated it once and abstained from using it. You need the credential of the client authenticating to your cluster. You have basically two options here:
If you are on Tomcat, you can try the JEE pre-auth wrapper from Spring Security along with my Tomcat SPNEGO AD Authenticator from trunk. If will receive the delegated credential from the client which will enable you to perform your task, assuming that your server account is trusted for delegation.
If the above is not an option, resort to S4U2Proxy/S4U2Self with Java 8 and obtain a Kerberos ticket on behalf of the user principal and perform then your REST API call.
As soon as you have the GSSCredential the flow is the same.
Disclaimer: I have no idea about Hadoop but the GSS-API process is always the same.

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