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Certificates and Globus Toolkit Security

The Grid extends the concept of a cluster to a more heterogeneous environment, where control and management of different clusters and systems are often the responsibility of entirely different organizations. The standard security mechanisms for clusters (such as standard Unix accounts, passwords, and other administrator controls) do not scale to environments managed by different organizations. Thus, security mechanisms must be devised that still provide the appropriate levels of access and control but can be managed in a distributed manner.

The Globus Toolkit® provides software for secure communication, authentication, and authorization within the context of Grid computing. Central to this technology is the notion of a PKI (public key infrastructure) credential. A PKI credential consists of a certificate and its corresponding private key. These credentials allow systems to be secured on an interorganization basis and are required for both users and resources on a Grid supporting Globus Toolkit security. In PKI terms, users and resources are considered end entities. Certificates associated with these entities are appropriately called end-entity certificates or EECs and make up a majority of the certificates involved in setting up a PKI deployment.

In this column we will focus on the certificate part of a PKI credential. A certificate consists of three parts:

  • A set of metadata, such as the identity of the owner of the key pair and the lifetime of the key pair
  • The public key corresponding to the private key part of the credential.
  • A digital signature generated by using the private key of the issuer. This signature binds the metadata to the public key

The issuer of certificates is called a CA (certificate authority). The CA verifies the identity of the person requesting the certificate and assigns a appropriate identity to the certificate. This verification can vary from setup to setup. Some certificate authorities may, for example, require requestors to apply to the CA in person and conduct extensive background checks, whereas others will simply issue certificates based purely on the requestor-supplied content of a simple web form.

Thus far, we have described a fairly generic PKI. The Globus Toolkit differs from other the generic model in that it introduces the proxy certificate. A proxy certificate (hereinafter proxy) is a certificate generated from an end-entity certificate and acts as a representative of the identity of said certificate. In other words, it acts as a proxy for the issuing certificate, a concept which is similar to that of proxies in the context of voting. There are several advantages to this:

  • One no longer needs to use the private key associated with the certificate. The key of the EEC is generally stored in a more secure fashion (e.g., password-protected storage) so automated retrieval becomes difficult. In other words, using proxy certificates provides single sign-on capability.
  • The lifetime of the proxy can be kept short. This reduces the exposure should the private key associated with the proxy certificate be compromised.
  • Proxy certificates provide a mechanism for creating certificates that contain only a subset of the rights granted to the identity represented by the certificate.

We note that the proxy certificate technology is about to become a RFC in the IETF PKIX working group.

How to Acquire a Certificate

Certificates, as mentioned above, are required for the operation of the software provided by the Globus Toolkit. This requirment leads to the question of how to find a provider of certificates that meets the security and operational needs you may have. As a first step, you should determine what certificate authorities are available. In general, you have three options for obtaining certificates: noncommercial CAs, commercial CAs, and do-it-yourself CAs.

A multitude of noncommercial CAs available. These generally fall into the categories of being very simplistic, for example, the Black Helicopter CA, or CAs associated with a specific organization, for example, the DOE Grids CA, which often require membership in the organization.

Commercial CAs, such as Verisign or GoDaddy, are also a possibility but may not be viable for economic reasons, especially when the number of resources and people involved is large.

The third option, setting up your own CA, may be suitable if you either need a certificate authority with basic capabilities, in which case the SimpleCA product described later in this article may meet your requirements, or if you require a more secure CA and have the in-house expertise required for running a CA, in which case you can use something like the software provided by OpenCA.

Before picking a CA, you should carefully evaluate any security, interoperability, and potential legal requirements you have.

Using the Globus Simple CA

For Globus Toolkit users who can't get a certificate from another certificate authority, usually the best option is to install the Globus Simple CA package, which allows you to setup your own CA (option 3 from the previous section) and generate certificates yourself (including your own CA certificate), without the dependency on a CA elsewhere. It was designed to make CA management relatively painless for the beginning user.

Step 1: Installation

The first step is installation of the Globus Simple CA package. This will install into your Globus installation tools and utilities needed in future steps. The Globus Simple CA package is provided as a GPT (Grid Packaging Toolkit) package (much like RPM), making installation easy. The installation command to use is

# gpt-build globus_simple_ca_bundle-latest.tar.gz <flavor type>

The <flavor type> is used by the Globus Toolkit to specify platform- and compiler-specific information. In this case, the <flavor type> should be the same as the rest of the Globus Toolkit installation. See the Resources for more information about Globus and the Globus Simple CA.

Step 2: CA Setup

The primary purpose of the second step is to generate the CA certificate. We will also generate configuration files needed to use the CA with the Globus Toolkit. This is done by using a setup script located within the Globus Distribution at

# $GLOBUS_LOCATION/setup/globus/setup-simple-ca

This script is automatically run by the gpt-postinstall command, so there is no need to run it by hand. The script will prompt you for information about the CA you wish to create. Most of the questions provide default answers, so if you are unsure, it's best to use the default. Here are the pieces of information you'll need to gather before running the setup script:

Sidebar One: What should I do with the generated CA setup package?

Anyone you can convince that you are a trustworthy CA (good luck!) should install the package. In reality, you will want to install it on all the machines that you want to include as part of your grid. The choice of distribution is up to you.

  • Subject Name of the CA - The subject name of the CA uniquely identifies it among other Grid CA certificates. An example subject name is

    cn=Sams CA, ou=SamsLittleGrid, o=Grid
    

    In this example, the organization is Grid, which uniquely identifies this CA as one that generates certificates used on the Grid. The organizational unit is SamsLittleGrid, which identifies this CA from other Grid CAs, and the common name is Sams CA, which identifies this particular certificate as the CA certificate within the SamsLittleGrid domain.

  • Email - This should be the email address where you intend to receive certificate requests.

  • Expiration - This is the number of days for which the CA certificate is valid. Once this time expires, the CA certificate will have to be recreated, and all of its certificates regranted.

  • Passphrase - The passpharse of the CA certificate will be used only when signing certificates (with grid-cert-sign). It should be hard to guess, as its compromise may compromise all the certificates signed by the CA.

The end results of running the setup script are the CA certificate and configuration files, which are packaged up in a GPT distribution package, to be installed on other systems. The filename of the generated GPT package in our example would be: globus_simple_ca_177ff0ce_setup-0.12.tar.gz.

The filenames (and package) are encoded with the hash of the subject name of the CA. For example, the CA subject mentioned above is given the hash 177ff0ce, so the CA certificate is given the filename 177ff0ce.0. The hash of the CA certificate uniquely identifies this CA from others (a Globus Toolkit installation is allowed to trust multiple certificate authorities).

Sidebar Two: How many CAs should I set up for a Grid?

The entire Grid should use the same CA, so you should install the Globus Simple CA and set up your own CA (as described in Step 2) only once.

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