Global_Catalog_Access_Control

Overview

As outlined in the High Level description of the Global Catalog service, FreeIPA Global Catalog service access is read-only. However, the access is authenticated to limit the exposure of the information similar to how Global Catalog in Active Directory by default limits its access to Authenticated Users.

Supported authentication schemes

Since FreeIPA Global Catalog service does not store information about credentials associated with the LDAP objects, it will have to proxy authentication requests to another, primary, sources. As result, following three authentication methods will be supported:

• LDAP simple bind authentication

• SASL GSSAPI authentication

• SASL GSS-SPNEGO authentication

In all cases the resulted authenticated LDAP identity will be mapped to the pre-defined LDAP object which will have read-only access rights associated with the Global Catalog subtree.

LDAP simple bind authentication

A request for LDAP simple bind authentication will be transformed into a PAM authentication request. A special PAM service will be provided to make sure FreeIPA HBAC rules can be applied to it to allow selective authentication for administrators wishing to disable access to Global Catalog with the use of LDAP simple bind. By default the HBAC service global-catalog will allow any valid user to authenticate against the Global Catalog service.

PAM authentication service relies on SSSD service running on the FreeIPA master. In result, any valid user recognized on the FreeIPA master will be able to authenticate using the global-catalog service, including valid accounts from the trusted Active Directory forests.

SASL GSSAPI authentication

For Kerberos-based authentication SASL GSSAPI method is provided. A special mapping rule is defined in the cn=config of the Global Catalog directory server instance will map any valid Kerberos principal to the pre-defined LDAP object with read-only access rights associated with the Global Catalog subtree.

SASL GSS-SPNEGO authentication

Windows client machines utilize SASL GSS-SPNEGO for the authentication, using their machine accounts. This mechanism is currently not supported by the CyrusSASL library. CyrusSASL library will need to be extended to allow SASL SPNEGO authentication to work (a patch exists to prove it is possible), but only Kerberos credentials will be accepted. An NTLMSSP-based authentication will not be supported in the initial implementation.

MS-ADTS specification chapter 7 explains the authentication methods supported by Microsoft Windows clients when accessing Active Directory, including Global Catalog service.