Client preauthentication interface (clpreauth)

During an initial ticket request, a KDC may ask a client to prove its knowledge of the password before issuing an encrypted ticket, or to use credentials other than a password. This process is called preauthentication, and is described in RFC 4120 and RFC 6113. The clpreauth interface allows the addition of client support for preauthentication mechanisms beyond those included in the core MIT krb5 code base. For a detailed description of the clpreauth interface, see the header file <krb5/clpreauth_plugin.h> (or <krb5/preauth_plugin.h> before release 1.12).

A clpreauth module is generally responsible for:

  • Supplying a list of preauth type numbers used by the module in the pa_type_list field of the vtable structure.
  • Indicating what kind of preauthentication mechanism it implements, with the flags method. In the most common case, this method just returns PA_REAL, indicating that it implements a normal preauthentication type.
  • Examining the padata information included in a PREAUTH_REQUIRED or MORE_PREAUTH_DATA_REQUIRED error and producing padata values for the next AS request. This is done with the process method.
  • Examining the padata information included in a successful ticket reply, possibly verifying the KDC identity and computing a reply key. This is also done with the process method.
  • For preauthentication types which support it, recovering from errors by examining the error data from the KDC and producing a padata value for another AS request. This is done with the tryagain method.
  • Receiving option information (supplied by kinit -X or by an application), with the gic_opts method.

A clpreauth module can create and destroy per-library-context and per-request state objects by implementing the init, fini, request_init, and request_fini methods. Per-context state objects have the type krb5_clpreauth_moddata, and per-request state objects have the type krb5_clpreauth_modreq. These are abstract pointer types; a module should typically cast these to internal types for the state objects.

The process and tryagain methods have access to a callback function and handle (called a “rock”) which can be used to get additional information about the current request, including the expected enctype of the AS reply, the FAST armor key, and the client long-term key (prompting for the user password if necessary). A callback can also be used to replace the AS reply key if the preauthentication mechanism computes one.