Re: (ITS#5812) New option to disable SASL host canonicalization

[rra@stanford.edu]

rra@stanford.edu writes:

> (1) is a vulnerability that Kerberos can protect against if you use it
> properly.  It's called the Zanarotti attack, and the way that you defend
> against it is by obtaining a service ticket for a principal in a local
> keytab after initial authentication and verifying that the service
> ticket matches.

I'm sorry -- this is wrong.  I overthought this.  The scenario discussed
here is not the Zanarotti attack.  The Zanarotti attack involves spoofing
the KDC so that you don't have to know the correct key for a principal;
you instead use a key that you know and fool the system into talking to a
KDC that uses the same key.  It's an attack on login or a screen saver to
allow someone to use a bogus password to authenticate.

The protection against the scenario (1) listed here is integral into the
Kerberos protocol.  The Kerberos authentication process involves
requesting a TGT from the KDC that's encrypted in your private key and
then decrypting the return with your private key.  You cannot spoof
Kerberos initial authentication from a keytab or a correct password by
using DNS to redirect the authentication to a bogus KDC because the bogus
KDC won't know your correct private key and hence won't be able to return
a TGT that you can decrypt.  Similarly, you can't successfully redirect a
TGS_REQ to a bogus KDC because that KDC doesn't have the private key and
can't complete the protocol exchange.

This is why kinit doesn't bother to protect against the Zanarotti attack;
there's no need, since kinit doesn't provide increased local privileges
and the Zanarotti attack is an attack only on the local system, not
against a network service.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>