Hi Denis and all,

On 15 May 2015, at 18:34, denis <ripedenis@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Hi Tim and All

Personalised authorisation is an idea I developed over the last few years. I talked to many people in the community about it at various RIPE meetings and started to build up support for my ideas.

I believe that the WG appreciates your efforts on this, and remembers your presentation at RIPE 68:
https://ripe68.ripe.net/presentations/299-DB_WG_personalised_Auth_RIPE_68.pdf


The basic idea was to allow authorisation tokens in PERSON objects,

Yes, the important point here is that the credentials are on PERSONs, rather than in one anonymous blob that is today's MNTNER.

group these into ROLE objects and use the ROLE 'instead of' a MNTNER. This is much more intuitive and better reflects real life business operations. The MNTNER object is an abstract construct that many people simply don't understand. The long term goal was to (possibly) eventually deprecate MNTNER objects.

There are different opinions on how to refer to authorised persons.

The idea to use ROLEs instead of MNTNERs was presented again at RIPE 69, along side with the idea of just allowing to refer to PERSONs from MNTNERs: https://ripe69.ripe.net/presentations/125-ripe69-db-wg-pers-auth.pdf

There was no support from the room, nor in informal discussions with working group members, for the option of using ROLEs instead of MNTNERs. While the basic idea sounds attractive there are a lot of problems on closer inspection. MNTNER objects differ from ROLEs in a number of ways that make this, and the ultimate deprecation of MNTNERs difficult. Slides 13 lists what is missing from ROLEs, and would be needed to use them in an mnt-* context. Slide 14 lists what is missing from MNTNERs that would have to be made up, or made optional possibly with business rules enforcing behaviour (e.g. address may still be needed for a *-c referenced role), if remaining MNTNERs were to be converted into ROLEs. And if the latter isn't done, then we would have to live with mnt-* being allowed to refer to either a MNTNER or a ROLE (with special attributes turned on), for a long time, and this is hardly intuitive.

There was however support for the basic concept of extending MNTNERs with personalised organisation in a backward compatible way that requires no action from any of the over 50,000 maintainers in the database. The RIPE NCC was tasked with working out and presenting a new plan based on this resulting in the presentation given at RIPE70: https://ripe70.ripe.net/presentations/165-ripe70-pers-auth.pdf


Trying to feed personalised auth into objects via MNTNERs, even worse through ROLEs and MNTNERs, is not only adding extra, unnecessary, layers of abstraction but making it even less intuitive and totally unrelated to real life situations.

In this proposal MNTNER objects remain the specialised security objects that they are today, including features lacking from the normal contact-oriented ROLE object, but personalised authorisation is added with minimal changes to the schema to allow those users that want to make use of this to do so, without forcing any existing maintainer to be modified.

This is low hanging fruit.

Referring from an object to a MNTNER, and from that MNTNER to a number of authorised PERSONs does not add any layers compared to using a ROLE there instead of the MNTNER. And note that I did not favour using ROLEs in between MNTNERs and authorised PERSONs for this very reason, in response to your comment through chat during the WG session that this should be allowed.


My original idea was to simplify the auth model and bring it closer to reality, adding extra, beneficial features, without losing any of the operational features currently available through MNTNERs....but without the need to use MNTNERs. Everything can be done with PERSON and ROLE objects...which people understand.

I honestly believe that the now proposed model does all this, the one thing people need to understand is that a MNTNER despite the name 'maintainer' being singular would be allowed to make explicit references to different PERSONs who do the actual maintaining.

The MNTNER is like a ROLE for security context.

The MNTNER has extra things important to security like:
 - where do the alerts go?
 - where do the notifications go?

And it's lacking other things relevant to people looking to contact a group of people, but irrelevant when authorising a group of people. Such as: address, email, phone and fax.


I had this all worked out in my head how to achieve all this, which is not technically very difficult to implement and not hard to understand and can be done in parallel with current MNTNER operation (so no one has to change if they don't want to). But I never wrote any of this down or presented any detail to anyone. So I would like to present an alternative option to the community, along the lines I was thinking and had discussed briefly with many people. It may take me a week or so to write it all out and present it as a RIPE Labs article.

cheers
Denis Walker
Independent Netizen

On 15/05/2015 10:27, Tim Bruijnzeels wrote:
Dear working group,

Yesterday during the WG session we presented a proposal for implementing personalised authorisation:

As recorded in the first cut of the minutes:
D. Personalised authentication (Tim Bruijnzeels, RIPE NCC)
  (See presentation)
  This will allow one click creation of person objects
  Maintain credentials in one place.
  Allow better auditing.
  Done by extending person object to have multiple optional auth: attribute
  This will ultimately allow existing auth: sso references to be cleaned up
  Last auth: attribute should not be removed from a person object that is used in an authorisation context.

Apart from questions about possible additions below, there seemed to be general approval for the above as an addition to the existing maintainer mechanism.

We would very much like to implement this soon. We are already working on improving the way users can log in and use the web updates, and manage maintainers (and who is authorised for them), so having this would be extremely useful for that effort.

Technically I don't think the above has to depend on further extensions below. Roles can be added at any time that we consensus on them, and showing audit logs is a separate effort - building on this.

  Should this be extended to the role object as well? This would involve additional business rules but is technically possible.

I understand and fully agree that there is a need to maintain a list of authorised persons centrally. But in effect a maintainer can be used for this purpose. Multiple objects can be maintained by the same maintainer, and the list of persons authorised can then be managed on this single maintainer:

obj1    ---\
            ---> mnt1  --->  pers1
obj2    ---/           \-->  pers2
 

In other words, just like role objects can group persons in a 'contact' context, 'maintainers' could group persons in a 'authorisation' context, where also other things such as "upd-to:" etc can find a home.

So, technically I don't think there is a need to have another role object here:

obj1    ---\
            ---> mnt1  --->  role1  ---> pers1
obj2    ---/                        \--> pers2

Conceptually this can work of course, but it adds some complexity, and things to resolve:

a) referencing roles from maintainers, and authorised persons from roles

The proposal was to refer to authorised persons from maintainers like this:   auth:  person-<nichandle>

Can we resolve this by allowing:
  = auth:  role-<nichdl> on maintainers
  = auth:  person-<nichdl> on roles 

But no other auth: flavours for now.

Also note that this person is not necessarily an authorisation *contact* for others. If we follow current practice consistently we would filter this value for security purpose.

b) business rules regarding auth->role

Suggestion:
- A role can only be added to a maintainer as "auth: role-<nichdl>" if it has at least one "auth: person-<nichdl>"
- The last "auth: person" can not be removed from a role if it's referenced anywhere as "auth: role-"
- As before: "auth: person-<nichl>" can only be added if the person has at least one "auth: <something>"
- As before: the last "auth:" can not be removed from a person if it's referenced anywhere as "auth: person-"

  It would be useful to record what credential (maintainer) was used to make a particular change to an object and this change
  would facilitate this. RV was asked to raise this on the mailing list.

Currently we do know internally which maintainer was used to submit a successful update, but not which credential. Technically this could be added of course. And in case of SSO or PGP people can get some idea of which user did the update. But showing which password hash was used for an update may not be best security practice.

With authorisation delegated to persons (possibly through roles) we will be able to give a much more better output. We can refer to the name of the person, rather than a credential that should be private to that person.

Also note that for any of this we will also need to be sure that the user viewing this information is authorised to see this. So what we had in mind here is to show this only on the web interface for logged in users authorised for at least one mnt-by of the object they are looking at.