[RFC] New authentication management syscalls

David Howells (dhowells@redhat.com)
Fri, 09 May 2003 14:11:17 +0100


Hi Trond, Arjan,

I'm trying to come up with a way of allowing userspace to present
authentication tokens to the kernel. What I've come up with involves the
addition of six system calls:

(1) setpag()

Put the calling process into a new process authentication group (PAG).

(2) getpag()

Get the PAG ID of the calling process.

(3) settok(const char *fs, const char *key, size_t size, const void *data)

Present data to the named filesystem as being the authentication token
for the specified key (eg: an AFS cell). If accepted, this token should
be stored in the PAG to which the calling process belongs.

(4) gettok(const char *fs, const char *key, size_t size, void *buffer)

Get a copy of an authentication token from the current PAG.

(5) deltok(const char *fs, const char *key)

Delete an authentication token from the current PAG.

(6) cleartoks(const char *fs)

Clear all the tokens belonging to a particular filesystem from the
current process's PAG.

The kernel would need to be modified in a number of ways:

(1) PAGs would need to be uniquely numbered managed kernel object. Each
process should belong to a PAG. Each PAG would contain a list of tokens.

(2) I'd like to include Trond's vfs_cred idea (move fsuid, fsgid and groups
out of the task_struct) and make the vfs_cred point to the PAG for the
process.

(3) The struct file_system_type would gain at least one new entry point:

struct file_system_type {
...
int settok(struct file_system_type *fstype,
const char *domain,
size_t size,
const void *data);
};

If this method returned 0, then the token would be added to the PAG's
list, if it returned an error, then it'd be ignored.

David
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