On 7/15/2022 6:18 PM, Richard Brittain ([email protected]) wrote:
On 2022-07-15, 09:04, "Jeffrey E Altman" <[email protected]> wrote:

     On 7/13/2022 6:07 PM, Richard Brittain ([email protected])
     wrote:
     > I hope that doesn't lead people to expect 'pts membership 
system:authuser' to show all users.
     >
     > Richard

     I'm curious.  Why would it be wrong for users to expect 'pts membership
     system:authuser' and 'pts membership system:anyuser' to list their
     membership assuming the caller had the necessary access rights?

Only that the output of system:authuser would be confusingly long, and what 
would system:anyuser generate anyway ?.  We also have scripts for 'show me 
everyone who has access to this entity', which gets complicated with nested 
groups, and I couldn't figure out what to display for 'everyone'.  It would be 
valid to ignore named users in the ACL and just say 'everyone' in that case.

What to display for "everyone" is easy, its "system:anyuser".

The output of system:authuser in OpenAFS would be close to the output of

    pts listentries -user | grep -v '@' | grep -v 'anonymous' | gawk '{print $1}'

In other words, the list of all user entries that are not foreign and are not "anonymous".   it would also exclude any IP address entries.

The output of system:anyuser would be

    pts listentries -user | gawk '{print $1}'

again with the exception of all IP address entries.   The difference is that system:anyuser output includes "anonymous" and the foreign entities.

In an AuriStorFS world the system:authuser and system:anyuser lists would also exclude "machine" and "network" entities.

Enumerating the membership of system:anyuser and system:authuser would by default be restricted to "-showmembers self" which means that only members of the system:administrators group would be able to enumerate the membership.

A cell that wished to offer broader access might set "-showmembers members" on system:authuser but that would be the same as "-showmembers anyone" for "system:anyuser".   I think the default is appropriate for all cells.

Tangentially related, we use a wrapper to list AFS groups, which looks up a few 
bits of useful information about each member besides their AFS username.  This 
is very user-friendly, but means lots of LDAP lookups and would take forever on 
the full output of system:authuser.

Makes sense.   That would take a while for a cell with several hundred thousand users.

I can imagine a plugin for both the protection service and the pts client that would allow the protection service to query LDAP or some other service and return an opaque blob to the pts client to be unpacked and displayed by the pts plugin.

Jeffrey Altman


Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

Reply via email to