[Gluster-users] Secured mount in GlusterFS using keys

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Deepak,

I am little confused about what you are trying to accomplish here. If I am
understanding your use case properly, you want to ensure that a client may
only mount a gluster volume if and only if it presents a key or secret that
attests to the client's identity, which the gluster server can use to
verify that client's identity. That's exactly what gluster MTLS is doing
since the gluster server performs chain-of-trust validation on the client's
leaf certificate.

Of course this will necessarily force encryption of the I/O path since its
TLS. I don't understand why I/O path encryption is something you want to
avoid -- seems like an essential part of basic network security that you
get for "free" with the authentication. It is true that if you want the
key-based authentication of a gluster client, you will need gluster MTLS.
You could treat encryption as the "cost" of getting authentication if you
will.

Now I am personally pretty negative on X.509 and chain-of-trust in general,
since the trust model has been proven to not scale and is frequently broken
by malicious and incompetent CAs. I also think its a completely
inappropriate security model for something like gluster where all endpoints
are known and controlled by a single entity, forcing a massive amount of
unnecessary complexity with certificate management with no real added
security. I have thought about making a feature request that gluster
support a simple public-key encryption that's implemented like SSH. But all
that said, MTLS is a well-tested, well known security protocol and the
gluster team built it on top of openssl so it does get the security job
done in an acceptable way. The fact that the I/O path is encrypted is not
the thing that bothers me about the implementation though.


Joe

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 11:57 AM, Deepak Naidu <dnaidu at nvidia.com> wrote:

> Thanks Joseph for info.
>
> >>In addition, gluster uses MTLS (each endpoint validate's the other's
> chain-of-trust), so you get authentication as well.
>
> Does it only do authentication of mounts. I am not interested at this
> moment on IO path encryption only looking for authentication.
>
> >>you can set the auth.allow and auth.reject options to whitelist and
> blacklist clients based on their source IPs.
>
> I have used this but unfortunately I don't see ipbased / hostbased ACL as
> matured method, unless GlusterFS supports Kerberos completely. The reason I
> am looking for key or secret based secured mounts is, there will be entire
> subnet granted to the service & more elegant way is to allow only the
> client on that subnet to gluster mount would be if they use keys/secret as
> the client might next cycle/reboot get different IP. I can find workaround
> related to IP but this seems really weird that gluster only uses SSL to
> encrypt IO traffic but not use the same for authenticated mount.
>
>
>
> --
> Deepak
>
> > On Mar 18, 2017, at 9:14 AM, Joseph Lorenzini <jaloren at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi Deepak,
> >
> > Here's the TLDR
> >
> > If you don't want the I/O path to be encrypted but you want to control
> access to a gluster volume, you can set the auth.allow and auth.reject
> options to whitelist and blacklist clients based on their source IPs.
> There's also always iptables rules if you don't want to do that.
> >
> > Note this only address a client's (i.e system where multiple unix users
> can exist) to mount a gluster volume. This does not address access by
> different unix users on that mounted gluster volume -- that's a separate
> and much more complicated issue. I can elaborate on that more if you want.
> >
> > Here's the longer explanation on the TLS piece.
> >
> > So there are a couple different security layers here. TLS will in fact
> encrypt the I/O path -- that's one of its key selling points which is to
> ensure confidentiality of the data sent between the gluster server and
> gluster client. In addition, gluster uses MTLS (each endpoint validate's
> the other's chain-of-trust), so you get authentication as well.
> Additionally, if you set the auth.ssl-allow option on the gluster volume,
> you can specify whether authenticated TLS client is permitted to access the
> volume based on the common name in the client's certificate. This provides
> an inflexible but reasonably strong form of authorization.
> >
> >
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