Service Token Composite Authorization

Proposed bp service-tokens

The concept behind the service token is to provide a mechanism to allow a service to handle a request in a different manner if the request is received from the user directly or via another OpenStack service.

Simple Example Request Workflow:

+----------------+
|      User      |
+-------+--------+
        | Access Image Data Request
        | X-AUTH-TOKEN: <end user token>
        | X-SERVICE-TOKEN: None
        |
+-------v---------+
|     Glance      |
+-------+---------+
        | Access Image Data Request
        | X-AUTH-TOKEN: <original end user token>
        | X-SERVICE-TOKEN: <glance service user token>
        |
+-------v---------+
|      Swift      |
+-----------------+

Problem Description

In some cases it is desirable to handle a request differently depending on if the request is made directly to the service instead of via an intermediary service.

In the example workflow above, accessing the image data can only occur via the Glance Service. If the user directly accesses the data via the Swift API, the policy would enforce a HTTP 403 Forbidden. This is to ensure that the user cannot perform an update (maintain data integrity) of the image without the Glance Service being aware of it.

The End User would make a request to Glance presenting the standard Auth Token. The auth_token middleware running in Glance will authorize the End User to make the API request for the image data.

Glance will then make the request to Swift presenting both the End User‘s token and the Glance Service User‘s token. The middleware running in Swift will decode both the End User‘s token and the Glance Service User‘s token and present the Swift service with the information from both tokens. Swift will then make a policy decision, now capable of enforcing that the request came from Glance instead of directly through the Swift API.

Proposed Change

The Keystone auth_token middleware will be modified to accept a second token header: X-SERVICE-TOKEN. If presented with the X-SERVICE-TOKEN header, it will decode the data from the service token and present it to the underlying service in the same manner that the data from X-AUTH-TOKEN is presented. The new data decoded from the X-SERVICE-TOKEN will use separate and distinct naming indicating it originated from the X-SERVICE-TOKEN (e.g. if HTTP_X_ROLES was extracted from the X-AUTH-TOKEN header, the service equivalent will be HTTP_X_SERVICE_ROLES).

This will allow the policy engine running inside the service to make policy decisions on the data provided from both tokens and/or respond differently based upon the presence of (or lack of presence of) either token.

Alternatives

• Extend the Trust system to support more specific delegation of roles.

  Extending the Trust system and delegation capabilities would provide a significantly more difficult user experience for the end user. It would require delegating a Role to the service user explicitly and then making the request. The Service would need to know about the explicit Trust and know to scope a token to that Trust.

  This does not resolve the desire to secure the data from CRUD operations circumventing the service (e.g. Glance storing images in Swift).

• Continue to simply utilize the user’s permission and bearer token exclusively.

  This does not resolve the desire to secure the data from CRUD operations circumventing the service (e.g. Glance storing images in Swift).

• A composite token requested from Keystone, which combines both original tokens into a new token.

  The original concept for this specification included requesting a new token from Keystone. This new token would contain elements from both of the original Tokens. This mechanism would provide the same benefits as the Service Token does and would allow the services to be aware of the entire path the request has taken (e.g. User -> Nova -> Glance -> Swift).

  The biggest downside would be needing to ask Keystone for a new token each step of the way (and forcing Keystone to resolve if it was allowed to issue a new Token). The extra round trip to Keystone would introduce significant overhead for minimal benefits: requiring each step to talk directly to Keystone eliminates the benefit of decoding/validating PKI tokens locally in the auth_token middleware. Complex policy decisions based upon the entire request path would be an extreme edge case and does not justify the overhead of extra round-trips to the Keystone service.

• OAUTH

  The current implementation of OAuth within Keystone has similar issues to expanding the Trust system. It also has fixed renewal requirements on a globally configured option. This would require continual re-authentication of the access (and/or request) tokens (end user intervention). Modifying the OAuth system to conform to the new use-cases would change the way users currently interact (and expect OAuth) to function, potentially breaking the contract defined in the OAuth APIs and requiring end users to update all tools/scripts/etc that currently utilize the OAuth system.

Data Model Impact

None

REST API Impact

None

Security Impact

Describe any potential security impact on the system. Some of the items to consider include:

• Does this change touch sensitive data such as tokens, keys, or user data?

  This introduces support for a second token to transmit data for policy enforcement purposes to the services running behind auth_token middleware.

• Does this change alter the API in a way that may impact security, such as a new way to access sensitive information or a new way to login?

  Policy enforcement will now have access to the data from the service token. This will not change any access to sensitive information without an explicit change to the policy for the service behind auth_token middleware.

• Does this change involve cryptography or hashing?

  No

• Does this change require the use of sudo or any elevated privileges?

  No

• Does this change involve using or parsing user-provided data? This could be directly at the API level or indirectly such as changes to a cache layer.

  No

• Can this change enable a resource exhaustion attack, such as allowing a single API interaction to consume significant server resources? Some examples of this include launching subprocesses for each connection, or entity expansion attacks in XML.

  No more so than normal PKI tokens.

Notifications Impact

No extra notification events will occur. CADF authentication events will be emitted when service users authenticate to get their service token.

Other End User Impact

Aside from the API, are there other ways a user will interact with this feature?

• The session object in keystoneclient will need to support being able to send the X-SERVICE-TOKEN header. This should only impact service usage of the various python client libraries consuming keystoneclient session for authentication purposes.

Performance Impact

• Decoding the information from X-SERVICE-TOKEN header requires extra calls to CMS (subprocess) or request to Keystone in the case of UUID tokens.
• A service should attempt to re-use its service token as long as the token is not about to expire. This will limit round-trips to Keystone to request a new token to provide in the X-SERVICE-TOKEN header. Each service will be responsible for refreshing its service token as needed.
• The request overhead due to the included token(s) doubles.

Other Deployer Impact

Discuss things that will affect how you deploy and configure OpenStack that have not already been mentioned, such as:

• What config options are being added? Should they be more generic than proposed (for example a flag that other hypervisor drivers might want to implement as well)? Are the default values ones which will work well in real deployments?

  Any service updated to leverage sending a X-SERVICE-TOKEN header will need to have options for service user credentials added.

• Is this a change that takes immediate effect after its merged, or is it something that has to be explicitly enabled?

  Any service leveraging the X-SERVICE-TOKEN header will need policy explicitly built to enforce based upon the data in the extra header. Any service that wishes to send the X-SERVICE-TOKEN header will need to be configured with service user credentials.

• Please state anything that those doing continuous deployment, or those upgrading from the previous release, need to be aware of. Also describe any plans to deprecate configuration values or features. For example, if we change the directory name that instances are stored in, how do we handle instance directories created before the change landed? Do we move them? Do we have a special case in the code? Do we assume that the operator will recreate all the instances in their cloud?

  The changes to the services leveraging the composite authorization implementation should be (mostly) transparent. It will be a policy deployment to enable (at most).

Developer Impact

Discuss things that will affect other developers working on OpenStack, such as:

• Developers will need to leverage the new Session object from keystoneclient for authentication to external services to ensure the X-SERVICE-TOKEN is properly populated when making requests to external OpenStack services.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Morgan Fainberg (mdrnstm)

Other contributors:

Stuart McLaren

Work Items

• auth_token middleware support for decoding and presenting data from X-SERVICE-TOKEN
• KeystoneClient session object support for X-SERVICE-TOKEN
• Cross Project collaboration to leverage and/or document policy recommendations that use the data from X-SERVICE-TOKEN for enforcement.

Dependencies

None

Testing

Unit tests for auth_token middleware will need to be developed to validate data from both X-AUTH-TOKEN and X-SERVICE-TOKEN are being presented to the underlying service.

As services are capable of emitting new header and enforcing policy on the extra information received through the auth_token middleware, Tempest tests will be needed to validate the new policy models. Consuming the data from the new X-SERVICE-TOKEN header will use the logical and and logical or mechanisms within the policy DSL to enforce on the combination of service-token data and user-token data.

Documentation Impact

• Deployment doc change and best practices (service user creation, role assignment, etc) will need to be written.
• Example policy files will need to be created that show how to use the new data provided from X-SERVICE-TOKEN when making policy enforcement decisions.

References

• Previous Example implementation: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/88366/
• http://dolphm.com/openstack-juno-design-summit-outcomes-for-keystone/#compositetokens