Federated identity » History » Revision 5
Revision 4 (Tom Clegg, 04/18/2017 06:34 PM) → Revision 5/22 (Peter Amstutz, 06/19/2017 06:23 PM)
h1. Federated identity A person should be able to create an account and get a token from a single identity provider, and use that token to access private/protected resources on multiple Arvados clusters. Motivating use cases: * A user on cluster B shares a project with a user on cluster A. * A container running on cluster A reads and writes data on cluster B. * A user logged in to Workbench A can search/view/download/upload collections at cluster B. Configuration examples: * An organization has 5 clusters, but only one of them has user accounts and roles in its database. * An on-premise cluster runs containers that use public data stored in the cloud (without mirroring the data locally). h2. Design sketch Each Arvados client must be able to prove to cluster B that it is authorized by cluster A to act on behalf of a user account which is controlled by cluster A. This must not involve giving enough information to cluster B to act on behalf of the user account: for example, the client cannot simply give cluster B its cluster A token for the purpose of doing a canary query. h2. Protocol ideas "SRP-6a":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol "Salted tokens": instead of passing its literal token, the client passes the token UUID and @HMAC(token, "bbbbb")@ when sending a request to cluster B (where "bbbbb" is cluster B's cluster ID / UUID prefix). Cluster B validates the request by passing those two parameters untouched to a "verify request" ("no-op") endpoint at cluster A. (PA) an even simpler approach would be be to contact cluster A to get a scoped token which only allows "GET /users/current" on cluster A but is accepted by cluster B as an [all] token for that user. h2. TODO Things to address * how to sync groups * diagrams * mnemonic cluster names / more concrete examples (including who is reachable on the internet) * [how] do you get a list of users you can share stuff with? * clarify what UUIDs look like (some people have A uuids, some have B uuids)