Using external authentication with Keystone¶
When Keystone is executed in a web server like Apache HTTPD, it is possible to have the web server also handle authentication. This enables support for additional methods of authentication that are not provided by the identity store backend and the authentication plugins that Keystone supports.
Having the web server handle authentication is not exclusive, and both Keystone and the web server can provide different methods of authentication at the same time. For example, the web server can provide support for X.509 or Kerberos authentication, while Keystone provides support for password authentication (with SQL or an identity store as the backend).
When the web server authenticates a user, it sets environment variables,
usually REMOTE_USER
, which can be used in the underlying application.
Keystone can be configured to use these environment variables to determine the
identity of the user.
Configuration¶
In order to activate the external authentication mechanism for Identity API v3,
the external
method must be in the list of enabled authentication methods.
By default it is enabled, so if you don’t want to use external authentication,
remove it from the methods
option in the auth
section.
To configure the plugin that should be used set the external
option again
in the auth
section. There are two external authentication method plugins
provided by Keystone:
DefaultDomain
: This plugin won’t take into account the domain information that the external authentication method may pass down to Keystone and will always use the configured default domain. TheREMOTE_USER
variable is the username. This is the default if no plugin is given.Domain
: This plugin expects that theREMOTE_DOMAIN
variable contains the domain for the user. If this variable is not present, the configured default domain will be used. TheREMOTE_USER
variable is the username.
Caution
You should disable the external auth method if you are currently using
federation. External auth and federation both use the REMOTE_USER
variable. Since both the mapped and external plugin are being invoked to
validate attributes in the request environment, it can cause conflicts.
For example, imagine there are two distinct users with the same username
foo, one in the Default domain while the other is in the BAR domain.
The external Federation modules (i.e. mod_shib) sets the REMOTE_USER
attribute to foo. The external auth module also tries to set the
REMOTE_USER
attribute to foo for the Default domain. The
federated mapping engine maps the incoming identity to foo in the BAR
domain. This results in user_id conflict since both are using different
user_ids to set foo in the Default domain and the BAR domain.
To disable this, simply remove external from the methods option in keystone.conf:
methods = external,password,token,oauth1
Using HTTPD authentication¶
Web servers like Apache HTTP support many methods of authentication. Keystone
can profit from this feature and let the authentication be done in the web
server, that will pass down the authenticated user to Keystone using the
REMOTE_USER
environment variable. This user must exist in advance in the
identity backend to get a token from the controller.
To use this method, Keystone should be running on HTTPD.
X.509 example¶
The following snippet for the Apache conf will authenticate the user based on a valid X.509 certificate from a known CA:
<VirtualHost _default_:5000>
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ssl.cert
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl.key
SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/allowed_cas
SSLCARevocationPath /etc/ssl/allowed_cas
SSLUserName SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_CN
SSLVerifyClient require
SSLVerifyDepth 10
(...)
</VirtualHost>