Please comment on approaches for different authentication mechanisms for internal/external users

Barrow H Kwan bhkwan at thoughtworks.com
Sun Feb 10 20:34:45 EST 2008


what happen to IP Spoofing ?  although that didn't seem to be a big 
concern as they will have to authenticate to either SecurID or the other 
authentication backend. 

I am interested to know what is the security risk for option 1 as I can 
see there is no code changes or introduce new code to get this 
internal/external authentication working with options 1


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Barrow Kwan
ThoughtWorks, Inc.

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"Arnaud Lesueur" <arnaud.lesueur at gmail.com> 
Sent by: cas-bounces at tp.its.yale.edu
02/09/08 01:24 AM
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Re: Please comment on approaches for different authentication   mechanisms 
for internal/external users






+1 for this nice architecture

Regards,

-Arnaud

On Feb 6, 2008 4:36 PM, Scott Battaglia <scott.battaglia at gmail.com> wrote:
Perryn,

Option 2 looks like the best choice if you can validate that cookie. 
Another choice, if you have the API for authenticating SecurID requests, 
is to have a action in the login flow that sends people to one of two 
authentication methods based on their IP address (i.e. internal vs. 
external).

-Scott

On Feb 4, 2008 9:09 PM, Perryn Fowler <pezlists at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Guys,

We have a particular problem we would like to solve, and have come up with 
some approaches - answers to my questions below, and general comments on 
the two approaches would be greatly appreciated.

THE PROBLEM

We have a number of services protected by CAS. Out users access these in 
two ways
      - from within our internal network
      - from an external netwrok.

For users that are coming from an external network, we require that they 
must authenticate using an RSA SecurID before accessing anything.

Currently there is no integration between this an CAS, so external users 
have to authenticate using their SecurID and then log in again to CAS 
using their CAS password.

We would like to make it so that SecurID users do not need to log in 
again, while still allowing internal users to log in using just their 
password.


APPROACH ONE

 There will be two CAS instances ( cas1 and cas2 ). 
              - cas1 will be configured to accept SecurID credentials and 
authenticate with the RAS ACE server using RADIUS
              - cas2 will be configured to accept password credentials and 
authenticate with our AD server

 cas1 will be accessible externally.  cas2 will be accessible from 
internally.
        - for example, cas1 has an internal IP address 10.200.1.1 and an 
external IP address 75.40.150.200. 
                             cas2 has an internal IP address 10.200.1.2. ( 
because cas2 is not accessible from external, so it will not have an 
external IP address )

When people hit http://cas.example.com from external, it will resolve the 
ip as 75.40.150.200.  The firewall will NAT it to 10.200.1.1 and the user 
will be required to use RSA for authentication
When people hit http://cas.example.com from internal, it will resolve the 
ip as 10.200.1.2 and the user will be required to use AD for 
authentication

All our services will be configured to validate tickets with cas2. 

cas1 and cas2 are clustered ( or at least replicate their ticket cache).

This way, external users can authenticate against cas1 and then access 
services that validate tickets against cas 2

QUESTIONS ABOUT APPROACH ONE

1) I am a bit concerned about the security implications of ticket cache 
replication, since it seems to involve spraying  TGT information around 
using multicast. This worries me because
     a) it makes application security very dependant on the network 
security, to make sure this information doesnt 'leak'
     b) I guess you have to assume you can trust everyone on your internal 
network?
 
     This seems like a fairly big issue to me, but It seems that CAS 
clustering is quite wide-spread, so perhaps it isn't really such a big 
deal?
     As an alternative, could we acheive what we want by using a jdbc 
based ticket cache, and making both cas servers make secure connections to 
it?

2) Would this approach make clustering CAS for reliability or performance 
in the future more complicated?

3) Can anyone see other concerns with this approach?


APPROACH TWO

We have a single CAS server.

We leave the SecurID infrastructure as it is, so that external users have 
to authenticate using SecurID ( and hence have a rsa-cookie set) before 
they can access the CAS server.

The CAS server is configured to
       - authenticate using username/password if they are presented, 
otherwise
       - look for a rsa-cookie and authenticate using that if it is 
present 
       - otherwise show the password login form.


QUESTIONS ABOUT APPROACH TWO

1) I think it should be fairly easy to configure CAS to behave this way? 
Or have I missed something?

2) Does anyone actually know how you go about validating the rsa-cookie? 
Is it even possible?

3) Can anyone see other concerns with this approach?


TIA
Perryn



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-- 
Arnaud Lesueur

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lesueur 
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