Version 11 (Release 6.1)
Xsecurity(X1M)
Xsecurity --
X display access control
Description
X provides mechanism for implementing many access control systems.
The sample implementation includes three mechanisms:
Host Access-
Simple host-based access control.
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1-
Shared plain-text ``cookies''
MIT-KERBEROS-5-
Kerberos Version 5 user-to-user.
Access system descriptions
Host Access-
Any client on a host in the host access control list is allowed access to
the X server. This system can work reasonably well in an environment
where everyone trusts everyone, or when only a single person can log in
to a given machine, and is easy to use when the list of hosts used is small.
This system does not work well when multiple people can log in to a single
machine and mutual trust does not exist.
The list of allowed hosts is stored in the X server and can be changed with
the xhost command.
When using the more secure mechanisms listed below, the host list is
normally configured to be the empty list, so that only authorized
programs can connect to the display.
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1-
When using MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1,
the client sends a 128 bit ``cookie''
along with the connection setup information.
If the cookie presented by the client matches one
that the X server has, the connection is allowed access.
The cookie is chosen so that it is hard to guess;
xdm generates such cookies automatically when
this form of access control is used.
The user's copy of
the cookie is usually stored in the .Xauthority file in the home
directory, although the environment variable XAUTHORITY can
be used to specify an alternate location.
xdm automatically passes a cookie to the server for each new
login session, and stores the cookie in the user file at login.
The cookie is transmitted on the network without encryption, so
there is nothing to prevent a network snooper from obtaining the data
and using it to gain access to the X server. This system is useful in an
environment where many users are running applications on the same machine
and want to avoid interference from each other, with the caveat that this
control is only as good as the access control to the physical network.
In environments where network-level snooping is difficult, this system
can work reasonably well.
MIT-KERBEROS-5-
Kerberos is a network-based authentication scheme developed by MIT for
Project Athena. It allows mutually suspicious principals to
authenticate each other as long as each trusts a third party,
Kerberos. Each principal has a secret key known only to it and
Kerberos. Principals includes servers, such as an FTP server or X
server, and human users, whose key is their password. Users gain
access to services by getting Kerberos tickets for those services from
a Kerberos server. Since the X server has no place to store a secret
key, it shares keys with the user who logs in. X authentication thus
uses the user-to-user scheme of Kerberos version 5.
Since Kerberos is a user-based authorization protocol, like the
SUN-DES-1 protocol, the owner of a display can enable
and disable specific users, or Kerberos principals.
The xhost client is used to enable or disable authorization.
For example,
xhost krb5:judy krb5:gildea@x.org
adds ``judy'' from the Kerberos realm of the local machine, and ``gildea''
from the x.org realm.
The authorization file
Except for Host Access control, each of these systems uses data stored in
the .Xauthority file to generate the correct authorization information
to pass along to the X server at connection setup.
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
stores secret data in the file; so anyone who can read
the file can gain access to the X server.
Each entry in the .Xauthority file matches a certain connection family
(TCP/IP, DECnet or local connections) and X display name (hostname plus display
number). This allows multiple authorization entries for different displays
to share the same data file. A special connection family (FamilyWild, value
65535) causes an entry to match every display, allowing the entry to be used
for all connections. Each entry additionally contains the authorization
name and whatever private authorization data is needed by that authorization
type to generate the correct information at connection setup time.
The xauth program manipulates the .Xauthority file format.
It understands the semantics of the connection families and address formats,
displaying them in an easy to understand format. It also understands that
SUN-DES-1 and MIT-KERBEROS-5 use string values for the authorization data, and displays
them appropriately.
The X server (when running on a workstation) reads authorization
information from a file name passed on the command line with the
-auth
option.
The authorization entries in
the file are used to control access to the server. In each of the
authorization schemes listed above, the data needed by the server to initialize
an authorization scheme is identical to the data needed by the client to
generate the appropriate authorization information, so the same file can be
used by both processes. This is especially useful when xinit is used.
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1-
This system uses 128 bits of data shared between the user and the X server.
Any collection of bits can be used. xdm generates these keys using a
cryptographically secure pseudo random number generator, and so the key to
the next session cannot be computed from the current session key.
MIT-KERBEROS-5-
Kerberos reads tickets from the cache pointed to by the
KRB5CCNAME environment variable, so does not use any data from
the .Xauthority file. An entry with no data must still exist to tell
clients that MIT-KERBEROS-5 is available.
Unlike the .Xauthority file for clients, the authority file
passed by xdm to
a local X server (with ``-auth filename'', see xdm(1))
does contain the name of the credentials cache, since
the X server will not have the
KRB5CCNAME environment variable set.
The data of the MIT-KERBEROS-5 entry is the credentials cache name and
has the form ``UU:FILE:filename'', where filename is the
name of the credentials cache file created by xdm. Note again that
this form is not used by clients.
Files
.Xauthority
References
X(X1M),
xauth(X1M),
xhost(X1M),
xinit(X1M).
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 25 April 2004