Your first contact with Kerberos is similar to any login procedure at a normal networking system. Enter your user name. This piece of information and the name of the ticket-granting service are sent to the authentication server (Kerberos). If the authentication server knows you, it generates a random session key for further use between your client and the ticket-granting server. Now the authentication server prepares a ticket for the ticket-granting server. The ticket contains the following information—all encrypted with a session key only the authentication server and the ticket-granting server know:

This ticket is then sent back to the client together with the session key, again in encrypted form, but this time the private key of the client is used. This private key is only known to Kerberos and the client, because it is derived from your user password. Now that the client has received this response, you are prompted for your password. This password is converted into the key that can decrypt the package sent by the authentication server. The package is “unwrapped” and password and key are erased from the workstation's memory. As long as the lifetime given to the ticket used to obtain other tickets does not expire, your workstation can prove your identity.

To request a service from any server in the network, the client application needs to prove its identity to the server. Therefore, the application generates an authenticator. An authenticator consists of the following components:

All this information is encrypted using the session key that the client has already received for this special server. The authenticator and the ticket for the server are sent to the server. The server uses its copy of the session key to decrypt the authenticator, which gives it all the information needed about the client requesting its service, to compare it to that contained in the ticket. The server checks if the ticket and the authenticator originate from the same client.

Without any security measures implemented on the server side, this stage of the process would be an ideal target for replay attacks. Someone could try to resend a request stolen off the net some time before. To prevent this, the server does not accept any request with a time stamp and ticket received previously. A request with a time stamp differing too much from the time the request is received is ignored.

Kerberos authentication can be used in both directions. It is not only a question of the client being the one it claims to be. The server should also be able to authenticate itself to the client requesting its service. Therefore, it sends an authenticator itself. It adds one to the checksum it received in the client's authenticator and encrypts it with the session key, which is shared between it and the client. The client takes this response as a proof of the server's authenticity and they both start cooperating.

Tickets are designed to be used for one server at a time. Therefore, you need to get a new ticket each time you request another service. Kerberos implements a mechanism to obtain tickets for individual servers. This service is called the “ticket-granting service”. The ticket-granting service is a service (like any other service mentioned before) and uses the same access protocols that have already been outlined. Any time an application needs a ticket that has not already been requested, it contacts the ticket-granting server. This request consists of the following components:

Like any other server, the ticket-granting server now checks the ticket-granting ticket and the authenticator. If they are considered valid, the ticket-granting server builds a new session key to be used between the original client and the new server. Then the ticket for the new server is built, containing the following information:

The new ticket has a lifetime, which is either the remaining lifetime of the ticket-granting ticket or the default for the service. The lesser of both values is assigned. The client receives this ticket and the session key, which are sent by the ticket-granting service. But this time the answer is encrypted with the session key that came with the original ticket-granting ticket. The client can decrypt the response without requiring the user's password when a new service is contacted. Kerberos can thus acquire ticket after ticket for the client without bothering the user.

Any Kerberos environment must meet the following requirements to be fully functional:

The following figure depicts a simple example network with only the minimum components needed to build a Kerberos infrastructure. Depending on the size and topology of your deployment, your setup may vary.

Figure 6.1: Kerberos network topology #

Tip: Configuring subnet routing

For a setup similar to the one in Figure 6.1, “Kerberos network topology”, configure routing between the two subnets (192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24). Refer to Book “Reference”, Chapter 13 “Basic networking”, Section 13.4.1.5 “Configuring routing” for more information on configuring routing with YaST.

The domain of a Kerberos installation is called a realm and is identified by a name, such as EXAMPLE.COM or simply ACCOUNTING. Kerberos is case-sensitive, so example.com is a different realm than EXAMPLE.COM. Use the case you prefer. However, it is common practice to use uppercase realm names.

It is also a good idea to use your DNS domain name (or a subdomain, such as ACCOUNTING.EXAMPLE.COM). As shown below, your life as an administrator can be much easier if you configure your Kerberos clients to locate the KDC and other Kerberos services via DNS. To do so, it is helpful if your realm name is a subdomain of your DNS domain name.

Unlike the DNS name space, Kerberos is not hierarchical. So if you have a realm named EXAMPLE.COM with two “subrealms” named DEVELOPMENT and ACCOUNTING, these subordinate realms do not inherit principals from EXAMPLE.COM. Instead, you would have three separate realms, and you would need to configure cross-realm authentication for each realm, so that users from one realm can interact with servers or other users from another realm.

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume you are setting up only one realm for your entire organization. For the remainder of this section, the realm name EXAMPLE.COM is used in all examples.

The first thing required to use Kerberos is a machine that acts as the key distribution center, or KDC for short. This machine holds the entire Kerberos user database with passwords and all information.

The KDC is the most important part of your security infrastructure—if someone breaks into it, all user accounts and your infrastructure protected by Kerberos is compromised. An attacker with access to the Kerberos database can impersonate any principal in the database. Tighten security for this machine as much as possible:

To use Kerberos successfully, make sure that all system clocks within your organization are synchronized within a certain range. This is important because Kerberos protects against replayed credentials. An attacker might be able to observe Kerberos credentials on the network and reuse them to attack the server. Kerberos employs several defenses to prevent this. One of them is that it puts time stamps into its tickets. A server receiving a ticket with a time stamp that differs from the current time rejects the ticket.

Kerberos allows a certain leeway when comparing time stamps. However, computer clocks can be inaccurate in keeping time—it is not unheard of for PC clocks to lose or gain half an hour during a week. For this reason, configure all hosts on the network to synchronize their clocks with a central time source.

A simple way to do so is by installing an NTP time server on one machine and having all clients synchronize their clocks with this server. Do this by running an NTP daemon chronyd as a client on all these machines. The KDC itself needs to be synchronized to the common time source as well. Because running an NTP daemon on this machine would be a security risk, it is a good idea to do this by running chronyd -q via a cron job. To configure your machine as an NTP client, proceed as outlined in Book “Reference”, Chapter 18 “Time synchronization with NTP”, Section 18.1 “Configuring an NTP client with YaST”.

A different way to secure the time service and still use the NTP daemon is to attach a hardware reference clock to a dedicated NTP server and an additional hardware reference clock to the KDC.

It is also possible to adjust the maximum deviation Kerberos allows when checking time stamps. This value (called clock skew) can be set in the krb5.conf file as described in Section 6.5.6.3, “Adjusting the clock skew”.

This section covers the initial configuration and installation of the KDC, including the creation of an administrative principal. This procedure consists of several steps:

[libdefaults]
 dns_canonicalize_hostname = false
 rdns = false
 default_realm = example.com
 ticket_lifetime = 24h
 renew_lifetime = 7d

[realms]
  example.com = {
  kdc = kdc.example.com.:88
  admin_server = kdc.example.com
  default_domain = example.com
 }

 [logging]
 kdc = FILE:/var/log/krb5kdc.log
 admin_server = FILE:/var/log/kadmind.log
 default = SYSLOG:NOTICE:DAEMON

[domain_realm]
 .example.com = example.com
 example.com = example.com

> sudo kdb5_util create -r EXAMPLE.COM -s

Initializing database '/var/lib/kerberos/krb5kdc/principal' for realm 'EXAMPLE.COM',
master key name 'K/M@EXAMPLE.COM'
You are prompted for the database Master Password.
It is important that you NOT FORGET this password.
Enter KDC database master key:  1
Re-enter KDC database master key to verify:  2

> kadmin.local

kadmin> listprincs

K/M@EXAMPLE.COM
kadmin/admin@EXAMPLE.COM
kadmin/changepw@EXAMPLE.COM
krbtgt/EXAMPLE.COM@EXAMPLE.COM

> kadmin.local

kadmin> ank suzanne

suzanne@EXAMPLE.COM's Password: 1
Verifying password: 2

> sudo systemctl start krb5kdc
sudo systemctl start kadmind

> sudo systemctl enable krb5kdc kadmind

When the supporting infrastructure is in place (DNS, NTP) and the KDC has been properly configured and started, configure the client machines. To configure a Kerberos client, use one of the two manual approaches described below.

When configuring Kerberos, there are two approaches you can take—static configuration in the /etc/krb5.conf file or dynamic configuration with DNS. With DNS configuration, Kerberos applications try to locate the KDC services using DNS records. With static configuration, add the host names of your KDC server to krb5.conf (and update the file whenever you move the KDC or reconfigure your realm in other ways).

DNS-based configuration is generally a lot more flexible and the amount of configuration work per machine is a lot less. However, it requires that your realm name is either the same as your DNS domain or a subdomain of it. Configuring Kerberos via DNS also creates a security issue: An attacker can seriously disrupt your infrastructure through your DNS (by shooting down the name server, spoofing DNS records, etc.). However, this amounts to a denial of service at worst. A similar scenario applies to the static configuration case unless you enter IP addresses in krb5.conf instead of host names.

[libdefaults]
        default_realm = EXAMPLE.COM

[realms]
        EXAMPLE.COM = {
                kdc = kdc.example.com
                admin_server = kdc.example.com
        }

[domain_realm]
.example.com = EXAMPLE.COM
www.example.org = EXAMPLE.COM

_kerberos.www.example.org.  IN TXT "EXAMPLE.COM"

[libdefaults]
        clockskew = 60

To be able to add and remove principals from the Kerberos database without accessing the KDC's console directly, tell the Kerberos administration server which principals are allowed to do what by editing /var/lib/kerberos/krb5kdc/kadm5.acl. The ACL (access control list) file allows you to specify privileges with a precise degree of control. For details, refer to the manual page with man 8 kadmind.

For now, grant yourself the privilege to administer the database by putting the following line into the file:

suzanne/admin              *

Replace the user name suzanne with your own. Restart kadmind for the change to take effect.

You should now be able to perform Kerberos administration tasks remotely using the kadmin tool. First, obtain a ticket for your admin role and use that ticket when connecting to the kadmin server:

> kadmin -p suzanne/admin
Authenticating as principal suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM with password.
Password for suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM:
kadmin:  getprivs
current privileges: GET ADD MODIFY DELETE
kadmin:

Using the getprivs command, verify which privileges you have. The list shown above is the full set of privileges.

As an example, modify the principal suzanne:

> kadmin -p suzanne/admin
Authenticating as principal suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM with password.
Password for suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM:

kadmin:  getprinc suzanne
Principal: suzanne@EXAMPLE.COM
Expiration date: [never]
Last password change: Wed Jan 12 17:28:46 CET 2005
Password expiration date: [none]
Maximum ticket life: 0 days 10:00:00
Maximum renewable life: 7 days 00:00:00
Last modified: Wed Jan 12 17:47:17 CET 2005 (admin/admin@EXAMPLE.COM)
Last successful authentication: [never]
Last failed authentication: [never]
Failed password attempts: 0
Number of keys: 2
Key: vno 1, Triple DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1, no salt
Key: vno 1, DES cbc mode with CRC-32, no salt
Attributes:
Policy: [none]

kadmin:  modify_principal -maxlife "8 hours" suzanne
Principal "suzanne@EXAMPLE.COM" modified.
kadmin:  getprinc suzanne
Principal: suzanne@EXAMPLE.COM
Expiration date: [never]
Last password change: Wed Jan 12 17:28:46 CET 2005
Password expiration date: [none]
Maximum ticket life: 0 days 08:00:00
Maximum renewable life: 7 days 00:00:00
Last modified: Wed Jan 12 17:59:49 CET 2005 (suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM)
Last successful authentication: [never]
Last failed authentication: [never]
Failed password attempts: 0
Number of keys: 2
Key: vno 1, Triple DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1, no salt
Key: vno 1, DES cbc mode with CRC-32, no salt
Attributes:
Policy: [none]
kadmin:

This changes the maximum ticket life time to eight hours. For more information about the kadmin command and the options available, see the krb5-doc package or refer to the man 8 kadmin manual page.

So far, only user credentials have been discussed. However, Kerberos-compatible services need to authenticate themselves to the client user, too. Therefore, special service principals must be in the Kerberos database for each service offered in the realm. For example, if ldap.example.com offers an LDAP service, you need a service principal, ldap/ldap.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM, to authenticate this service to all clients.

The naming convention for service principals is SERVICE/HOSTNAME@REALM, where HOSTNAME is the host's fully qualified host name.

Valid service descriptors are:

Service principals are similar to user principals, but have significant differences. The main difference between a user principal and a service principal is that the key of the former is protected by a password. When a user obtains a ticket-granting ticket from the KDC, they needs to type their password, so Kerberos can decrypt the ticket. It would be inconvenient for system administrators to obtain new tickets for the SSH daemon every eight hours or so.

Instead, the key required to decrypt the initial ticket for the service principal is extracted by the administrator from the KDC only once and stored in a local file called the keytab. Services such as the SSH daemon read this key and use it to obtain new tickets automatically, when needed. The default keytab file resides in /etc/krb5.keytab.

To create a host service principal for jupiter.example.com enter the following commands during your kadmin session:

> kadmin -p suzanne/admin
Authenticating as principal suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM with password.
Password for suzanne/admin@EXAMPLE.COM:
kadmin:  addprinc -randkey host/jupiter.example.com
WARNING: no policy specified for host/jupiter.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM;
defaulting to no policy
Principal "host/jupiter.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM" created.

Instead of setting a password for the new principal, the -randkey flag tells kadmin to generate a random key. This is used here because no user interaction is wanted for this principal. It is a server account for the machine.

Finally, extract the key and store it in the local keytab file /etc/krb5.keytab. This file is owned by the superuser, so you must be root to execute the next command in the kadmin shell:

kadmin:  ktadd host/jupiter.example.com
Entry for principal host/jupiter.example.com with kvno 3, encryption type Triple
DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
Entry for principal host/jupiter.example.com with kvno 3, encryption type DES
cbc mode with CRC-32 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
kadmin:

When completed, make sure that you destroy the admin ticket obtained with kinit above with kdestroy.

Warning: Incomplete configuration locks users out

An incomplete Kerberos configuration may lock you out of your system, including the root user. To prevent this, add the ignore_unknown_principals directive to the pam_krb5 module after you have added the pam_krb5 module to the existing PAM configuration files as described below.

> sudo pam-config --add --krb5-ignore_unknown_principals

This directs the pam_krb5 module to ignore errors that would otherwise cause the account phase to fail.

openSUSE® Leap comes with a PAM module named pam_krb5, which supports Kerberos login and password update. This module can be used by applications such as console login, su, and graphical login applications like GDM. That is, it can be used in all cases where the user enters a password and expects the authenticating application to obtain an initial Kerberos ticket on their behalf. To configure PAM support for Kerberos, use the following command:

> sudo pam-config --add --krb5

The above command adds the pam_krb5 module to the existing PAM configuration files and makes sure it is called in the right order. To make precise adjustments to how pam_krb5 is used, edit the file /etc/krb5.conf and add default applications to PAM. For details, refer to the manual page with man 5 pam_krb5.

The pam_krb5 module was specifically not designed for network services that accept Kerberos tickets as part of user authentication. This is an entirely different matter, and is discussed below.

OpenSSH supports Kerberos authentication in both protocol version 1 and 2. In version 1, there are special protocol messages to transmit Kerberos tickets. Version 2 does not use Kerberos directly anymore, but relies on GSSAPI, the General Security Services API. This is a programming interface that is not specific to Kerberos—it was designed to hide the peculiarities of the underlying authentication system, be it Kerberos, a public-key authentication system like SPKM, or others. However, the included GSSAPI library only supports Kerberos.

To use sshd with Kerberos authentication, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set the following options:

# These are for protocol version 1
#
# KerberosAuthentication yes
# KerberosTicketCleanup yes

# These are for version 2 - better to use this
GSSAPIAuthentication yes
GSSAPICleanupCredentials yes

Then restart your SSH daemon using sudo systemctl restart sshd.

To use Kerberos authentication with protocol version 2, enable it on the client side as well. Do this either in the system-wide configuration file /etc/ssh/ssh_config or on a per-user level by editing ~/.ssh/config. In both cases, add the option GSSAPIAuthentication yes.

You should now be able to connect using Kerberos authentication. Use klist to verify that you have a valid ticket, then connect to the SSH server. To force SSH protocol version 1, specify the -1 option on the command line.

Tip: More information

The file /usr/share/doc/packages/openssh/README.kerberos discusses the interaction of OpenSSH and Kerberos in more detail.

Tip: Additional directives for protocol version 2

The GSSAPIKeyExchange mechanism (RFC 4462) is supported. This directive specifies how host keys are exchanged. For more information, see the sshd_config manual page (man sshd_config).

While Kerberos provides authentication, LDAP is used for authorization and identification. Both services can work together.

For secure connections,389 Directory Server supports different ways of encrypting data: SSL/TLS connections, Start TLS connections, and SASL authentication. Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) is a network protocol designed for authentication. The SASL implementation used on openSUSE Leap is cyrus-sasl. Kerberos authentication is performed through GSS-API (General Security Services API), provided by the cyrus-sasl-gssapi package. Using GSS-API, 389 Directory Server uses Kerberos tickets to authenticate sessions and encrypt data.

With the SASL framework you can use different mechanisms to authenticate a user to the server. In Kerberos, authentication is always mutual. This means that not only have you authenticated yourself to the 389 Directory Server, but also the 389 Directory Server has authenticated itself to you. In particular, this means communication is with the desired server, rather than with a random service set up by an attacker.

To enable Kerberos to bind to the 389 Directory Server, create a principal ldap/ldap.example.com and add that to the keytab. The credentials used by the 389 Directory Server to authenticate are given to other servers by the keytab. 389 Directory Server assigns a keytab through the KRB5_KTNAME environment variable.

> kinit suzanne@EXAMPLE.COM

> ldapwhoami -Y GSSAPI -H ldap://ldapkdc.example.com
dn: uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com
    

The one behavioral difference between sec=sys and the Kerberos security levels that might be visible is related to group membership. In Unix and Linux, each file system access comes from a process that is owned by a particular user and has a particular group owner and several supplemental groups. Access rights to files can vary based on the owner and the groups.

With sec=sys, the user-id, group-id, and a list of up to 16 supplementary groups are sent to the server in each request.

If a user is a member of more than 16 supplementary groups, the extra groups are lost and files may not be accessible over NFS that the user would normally expect to have access to. For this reason, most sites that use NFS find a way to limit all users to at most 16 supplementary groups.

If the user runs the newgrp command or runs a set-group-id program, either of which can change the list of groups they are a member of, these changes take effect immediately and provide different accesses over NFS.

With Kerberos, group information is not sent in requests. Only the user is identified (using a Kerberos “principal”), and the server performs a lookup to determine the user ID and group list for that principal. This means that if the user is a member of more than 16 groups, these group memberships are used in determining file access permissions. However it also means that if the user changes a group-id on the client, the server does not notice the change and does not take it into account in determining access rights.

The improvement of having access to more groups brings a real benefit, and the loss of not being able to change groups is not noticed as it is not widely used. A site administrator considering the use of Kerberos should be aware of the difference though and ensure that it does not cause problems.

Using Kerberos for security requires extra CPU power for encrypting and decrypting messages. How much extra CPU power is required and whether the difference is noticeable varies with different hardware and different applications. If the server or client are already saturating the available CPU power, it is likely that a performance drop is measurable when switching from sec=sys to Kerberos. If there is spare CPU capacity available, it is possible that the transition does not result in any throughput change. The only way to be sure how much impact the use of Kerberos has is to test your load on your hardware.

The only configuration options that might reduce the load also reduce the quality of the protection offered. sec=krb5 should produce noticeably less load than sec=krb5p but, as discussed above, it does not produce strong security. Similarly it is possible to adjust the list of ciphers that Kerberos can choose from, and this might change the CPU requirement. However the defaults are carefully chosen and should not be changed without similar careful consideration.

The other possible performance issue when configuring NFS to use Kerberos involves availability of the Kerberos authentication servers, known as the KDC or Key Distribution Center.

The use of NFS adds load to such servers to the same degree that adding the use of Kerberos for any other services adds some load. Every time a given user (Kerberos principal) establishes a session with a service, for example by accessing files exported by a particular NFS server, the client needs to negotiate with the KDC. Once a session key has been negotiated, the client server can communicate without further help for many hours, depending on details of the Kerberos configuration, particularly the ticket_lifetime setting.

The concerns most likely to affect the provisioning of Kerberos KDC servers are availability and peak usage.

As with other core services such as DNS, LDAP or similar name-lookup services, having two servers that are reasonably “close” to every client provides good availability for modest resources. Kerberos allows for multiple KDC servers with flexible models for database propagation, so distributing servers as needed around campuses, buildings and even cabinets is straightforward. The best mechanism to ensure each client finds a nearby Kerberos server is to use split-horizon DNS with each building (or similar) getting different details from the DNS server. If this is not possible, then managing the /etc/krb5.conf file to be different at different locations is a suitable alternative.

As access to the Kerberos KDC is infrequent, load is only likely to be a problem at peak times. If thousands of people all log in between 9:00 and 9:05, then the servers receive many more requests-per-minute than they might in the middle of the night. The load on the Kerberos server is likely to be more than that on an LDAP server, but not orders of magnitude more. A sensible guideline is to provision Kerberos replicas in the same manner that you provision LDAP replicas, and then monitor performance to determine if demand ever exceeds capacity.

One service of the Kerberos KDC that is not easily distributed is the handling of updates, such as password changes and new user creation. These must happen at a single master KDC.

These updates are not likely to happen with such frequency that any significant load is generated, but availability could be an issue. It can be annoying to create a new user or change a password, and the master KDC on the other side of the world is temporarily unavailable.

When an organization is geographically distributed and has a policy of handling administration tasks locally at each site, it can be beneficial to create multiple Kerberos domains, one for each administrative center. Each domain would then have its own master KDC which would be geographically local. Users in one domain can still get access to resources in another domain by setting up trust relationships between domains.

The easiest arrangement for multiple domains is to have a global domain (for example, EXAMPLE.COM) and local domains (for example, ASIA.EXAMPLE.COM, EUROPE.EXAMPLE.COM). If the global domain is configured to trust each local domain, and each local domain is configured to trust the global domain, then fully transitive trust is available between any pair of domains, and any principal can establish a secure connection with any service. Ensuring appropriate access rights to resources, for example files provided by that service, depends on the user name lookup service used, and the functionality of the NFS file server, and is beyond the scope of this document.