should be shared between KDC and web-service. Us-
ing distinct Kerberos servers makes deployment more
difficult.
We successfully tried our approach also with SSH
and MongoDB (Enterprise server and a standard
client).
5 EVALUATION
In this section we evaluate our approach in terms of
deployability, usability, scalability and maintenance
efforts from the perspective of user, service provider
and identity federation.
The user does not need to deploy any non-standard
tool or do any specific configuration on her machine.
The Kerberos service ticket management can be done
with standard kinit program and NFS operations can
be performed with standard NFS client tools. The
initial registration phase can be completed with the
use of a standard web browser and, optionally, the
command-line script described in previous section.
Thus, the deployability and the usability of the ap-
proach are enabled for the user. For the user of the or-
ganisation hosting the kerberised service, the registra-
tion step might be not necessary if the service admin-
istrator has imported user home organisation data into
LDAP-Facade beforehand. For the external user the
registration provides means to use the service with-
out undergoing potentially complex procedure of cre-
ation of a user account in the organisation, thus im-
proving the usability of the service. The use of the
command-line script also helps to diminish the main-
tenance efforts for the Kerberos client key manage-
ment and NFS specific configuration for the user.
From the point of view of the service provider the
deployment of our approach does not require mod-
ification of the Kerberos server nor of the service.
Furthermore, if a service local identity management
system (e.g. local LDAP server containing local ac-
counts) exists beforehand, the migration to the LDAP-
Facade can be done seamlessly either migrating ex-
isting LDAP directory into LDAP-Facade or linking
it via LDAP proxying (Köhler et al., 2013). Using
LDAF-Facade instead of a plain LDAP server allows
the service provider to increase greatly the number of
the users of the service (the scale) by accepting them
from the whole federation instead of the local organi-
sation only. Depending on the policy of the service
provider, it can be configured to automatically ac-
cept new users joining the identity federation via their
home organisation IdPs. The scalability of the service
is enhanced by the registration interface which allows
to add user data to the LDAP-Facade directory easily.
From the perspective of the identity federation the
service provider integration can be done seamlessly,
without requiring adaptation of the existing compo-
nents of identity providers in the federation. The iden-
tity providers have to support WebSSO, ECP and As-
sertionQuery profiles of SAML standard. All three
profiles are supported by Shibboleth implementations
of the identity providers.
Though we have tested our approach with bwIDM
identity federation, it is not specific to it and can be
used with any SAML-based identity federation.
The implementation of our approach described in
this paper allowed us to provide NFS-based access
to LSDF facility to approximately 450,000 users of
bwIDM federation (Schlitter et al., 2014) in a deploy-
able, usable, scalable manner with minimal mainte-
nance efforts.
6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper we presented a general approach to inte-
grate web-based identity federations with non web-
based services that support Kerberos autentication
protocol. It does not require service or client mod-
ification or modification of standard protocols. The
components that should be set up are: web-service,
KDC service and a common database. We evaluated
this approach, using existing bwIDM identity feder-
ation and modified LDAP-Facade software as an im-
plementation of aforementioned components. For our
case deployment efforts were minimal. As non-web
based kerberized services we have chosen NFS, SSH
and MongoDB.
In the future we plan to test our approach with
more kerberized services. We will also work on the
improvement of commandline user tools for the man-
agement of their Kerberos credentials.
REFERENCES
Adamson, W. and Williams, N. (2014). Nfsv4 multi-domain
fedfs requirements. Internet-Draft draft-adamson-
nfsv4-multi-domain-federated-fs-reqs-05, IETF Sec-
retariat.
Astrand, L. H. and Yu, T. (2012). Deprecate des, rc4-hmac-
exp, and other weak cryptographic algorithms in ker-
beros. RFC 6649, RFC Editor.
Dierks, T. and Rescorla, E. (2008). The transport layer secu-
rity (tls) protocol version 1.2. RFC 5246, RFC Editor.
Garcia, A., Bourov, S., Hammad, A., van Wezel, J., Neu-
mair, B., Streit, A., Hartmann, V., Jejkal, T., Neu-
berger, P., and Stotzka, R. (2011). The large scale
AnApproachforIntegratingKerberizednonWeb-basedServiceswithWeb-basedIdentityFederations
149