[Mageia-sysadm] Saving and sharing passwords in mageia teams

[Buchan Milne]

On Friday, 18 February 2011 23:45:02 nicolas vigier wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We often need to register some accounts on various websites for the
> Mageia project (domain name registration, twitter, identica, etc ...).
> And we need to be able to share the account informations (login and
> password) with other people inside teams. So we need something like a
> password database, with permissions to restrict access to only some
> people or groups of people. We can store this database on Mageia servers,
> but I think it should be encrypted, so that root access on the server
> does not give access to the passwords.

This is not an uncommon requirement, in my work environment we need to be able 
to share the local root passwords (e.g. in case a system administrator needs 
to be able to restore something that prevents user logins from working).

However, in work environments, access to privileged passwords may need to be 
auditable.

> I have looked at existing tools, but didn't find one that would allow
> us to do this easily. So I'm thinking about writting some scripts to do
> it. It would work like this :
> 
>  - all users first need to upload their gnupg public key in ldap

I was already considering the requirement for GPG public keys in LDAP for 
'privileged user password recovery'. E.g., use the same process as 
unprivileged users, but encrypt the key sent to the user with their gpg public 
key (providing a second level of authentication - if we consider access to the 
mailbox one level).

I believe there may also an LDAP-based keyserver, which could provide even 
more re-use.

>  - we have a command to create a password on the server, with a list
>    of groups/users who can access this password :
>     $ mgapassword create passwdname %group1 %group2 user1 user2 ...

Should we leverage existing (e.g. LDAP) groups?

>  - a command to save the value of a password :
>     $ mgapassword set passwdname < value
>       or
>     $ mgapassword edit passwdname
>  - an other command to retrieve a password :
>     $ mgapassword get passwdname
>  - a command to list the passwords you can access :
>     $ mgapassword list
> 
> All commands connect to the server using ssh and the ldap account. When
> saving a password, the client ask to the server the list of gpg keys of
> all users who should have access to the password, then encrypt the
> password with all keys and send it encrypted to the server.

Where are the passwords stored?

> The command to retrieve a password connect to the server, then the server
> sends the password encrypted for the key of the user, which is decrypted
> locally using the private gpg key of the user.
> 
> When new users are added into a group, they cannot access passwords
> immediatly (as it is not encrypted for their keys), so someone needs to
> retrieve and save the passwords, to encrypt them for the new users.

This general approach was what I was considering for our work environment.

> So, what do you think about this ? Or maybe someone knows existing tools
> that can do this ?

I have not seen any I liked.

Our work environment has a basic inventory database (the primary use was to 
generate kickstart files), the web front end is in ... Catalyst (and possibly 
try and implement a more complete CMDB). My plan was to integrate the CatDap 
features into this (using CatalystX::Features maybe). Adding a shared password 
module that could be tied into CatDap and our work webapp would also be 
interesting to me.

But, for now, a command-line tool would be adequate.

I will look at the LDAP side (schema, ACLs, suoport for adding GPG public key 
from CatDap) over the weekend.

Regards,
Buchan