Skip to content
Snippets Groups Projects
  • David Woodhouse's avatar
    9ad282b1
    Remove all traces of FBOpenSSL SPNEGO support · 9ad282b1
    David Woodhouse authored
    This is just fundamentally broken. SPNEGO (RFC4178) is a protocol which
    allows client and server to negotiate the underlying mechanism which will
    actually be used to authenticate. This is *often* Kerberos, and can also
    be NTLM and other things. And to complicate matters, there are various
    different OIDs which can be used to specify the Kerberos mechanism too.
    
    A SPNEGO exchange will identify *which* GSSAPI mechanism is being used,
    and will exchange GSSAPI tokens which are appropriate for that mechanism.
    
    But this SPNEGO implementation just strips the incoming SPNEGO packet
    and extracts the token, if any. And completely discards the information
    about *which* mechanism is being used. Then we *assume* it was Kerberos,
    and feed the token into gss_init_sec_context() with the default
    mechanism (GSS_S_NO_OID for the mech_type argument).
    
    Furthermore... broken as this code is, it was never even *used* for input
    tokens anyway, because higher layers of curl would just bail out if the
    server actually said anything *back* to us in the negotiation. We assume
    that we send a single token to the server, and it accepts it. If the server
    wants to continue the exchange (as is required for NTLM and for SPNEGO
    to do anything useful), then curl was broken anyway.
    
    So the only bit which actually did anything was the bit in
    Curl_output_negotiate(), which always generates an *initial* SPNEGO
    token saying "Hey, I support only the Kerberos mechanism and this is its
    token".
    
    You could have done that by manually just prefixing the Kerberos token
    with the appropriate bytes, if you weren't going to do any proper SPNEGO
    handling. There's no need for the FBOpenSSL library at all.
    
    The sane way to do SPNEGO is just to *ask* the GSSAPI library to do
    SPNEGO. That's what the 'mech_type' argument to gss_init_sec_context()
    is for. And then it should all Just Work™.
    
    That 'sane way' will be added in a subsequent patch, as will bug fixes
    for our failure to handle any exchange other than a single outbound
    token to the server which results in immediate success.
    9ad282b1
    History
    Remove all traces of FBOpenSSL SPNEGO support
    David Woodhouse authored
    This is just fundamentally broken. SPNEGO (RFC4178) is a protocol which
    allows client and server to negotiate the underlying mechanism which will
    actually be used to authenticate. This is *often* Kerberos, and can also
    be NTLM and other things. And to complicate matters, there are various
    different OIDs which can be used to specify the Kerberos mechanism too.
    
    A SPNEGO exchange will identify *which* GSSAPI mechanism is being used,
    and will exchange GSSAPI tokens which are appropriate for that mechanism.
    
    But this SPNEGO implementation just strips the incoming SPNEGO packet
    and extracts the token, if any. And completely discards the information
    about *which* mechanism is being used. Then we *assume* it was Kerberos,
    and feed the token into gss_init_sec_context() with the default
    mechanism (GSS_S_NO_OID for the mech_type argument).
    
    Furthermore... broken as this code is, it was never even *used* for input
    tokens anyway, because higher layers of curl would just bail out if the
    server actually said anything *back* to us in the negotiation. We assume
    that we send a single token to the server, and it accepts it. If the server
    wants to continue the exchange (as is required for NTLM and for SPNEGO
    to do anything useful), then curl was broken anyway.
    
    So the only bit which actually did anything was the bit in
    Curl_output_negotiate(), which always generates an *initial* SPNEGO
    token saying "Hey, I support only the Kerberos mechanism and this is its
    token".
    
    You could have done that by manually just prefixing the Kerberos token
    with the appropriate bytes, if you weren't going to do any proper SPNEGO
    handling. There's no need for the FBOpenSSL library at all.
    
    The sane way to do SPNEGO is just to *ask* the GSSAPI library to do
    SPNEGO. That's what the 'mech_type' argument to gss_init_sec_context()
    is for. And then it should all Just Work™.
    
    That 'sane way' will be added in a subsequent patch, as will bug fixes
    for our failure to handle any exchange other than a single outbound
    token to the server which results in immediate success.