remctl release 2.16 (remote authenticated command execution with ACLs) Originally written by Anton Ushakov Currently maintained by Russ Allbery Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University. This software is distributed under a BSD-style license. Please see the file LICENSE in the distribution for terms of use and redistribution. For release history and user-visible changes, see the file NEWS. BLURB remctl is a client/server application that supports remote execution of specific commands, using Kerberos v5 GSS-API for authentication. Authorization is controlled by a configuration file and ACL files and can be set separately for each command, unlike with rsh. remctl is like a Kerberos-authenticated simple CGI server, or a combination of Kerberos rsh and sudo without most of the features and complexity of either. DESCRIPTION remctl is a client/server application that supports remote execution of specific commands, using Kerberos v5 GSS-API for authentication. Which commands a given user can execute is controlled by a configuration file and ACL files and can be easily tightly limited, unlike with rsh. remctld is very similar to a CGI server that uses a different network protocol than HTTP and always does strong authentication before executing the desired command. Alternately, you can think of it as a very simple combination of Kerberos rsh and sudo, without most of the features of both but with simpler authorization. This package was developed to replace the use of sysctl, another package that allowed remote code execution with Kerberos (v4) authentication. sysctl embedded Tcl and allowed for arbitrary Tcl code to be run, but at Stanford we found that in practice all we did with it was execute programs on the host system. remctl is a Kerberos v5 equivalent that does only the portions we actually needed. Both C and Java clients and servers are provided, as well as Perl, PHP, and Python bindings for the C client library. For more information about the Java client, see java/README. For more information about the PHP bindings, see php/README. For more information about the Python bindings, see python/README. Complete protocol documentation is available in docs/protocol.html. Also present, as docs/design.html, is the original design document (now somewhat out of date). REQUIREMENTS The remctld server and the standard client are written in C and require a C compiler to build. Both will build against either MIT Kerberos or Heimdal (tested with Heimdal 0.6 and later). remctl will also build against the Kerberos GSS-API implementation shipped with AIX 5.2. The remctl server will support regex ACLs if the system supports the POSIX regex API. The remctl server also optionally supports PCRE regular expressions in ACLs. To include that support, the PCRE library is required. To build the remctl client for Windows, the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista and the MIT Kerberos for Windows SDK are required, along with a Microsoft Windows build environment (probably Visual Studio). remctl has only been tested with the 3.2.1 MIT Kerberos for Windows SDK. To run the resulting binary, MIT Kerberos for Windows must be installed and configured. The client has been tested on Windows XP and Vista and should work on Windows 2000 and up. The server is not supported on Windows. To build the Perl bindings for the C client library, you will need Perl 5.6.0 or later. To run the full test suite for the Perl bindings, the Perl modules Test::More and Test::Pod must be installed. Test::More comes with Perl 5.8 and later. Test::Pod currently must be installed separately, but the POD tests will be skipped without interfering with the rest of the tests if it's not installed. The Perl bindings have not been tested on Windows. To build the PHP bindings for the C client library, you will need PHP 5.x (only tested with 5.2) and phpize, plus any other programs that phpize requires. The PHP bindings have not been tested on Windows. To build the Python bindings for the C client library, you will need Python 2.3 or later (primarily tested with Python 2.5). The Python bindings have not been tested on Windows. To build the Ruby bindings for the C client library, you will need Ruby 1.8 or later. The Ruby bindings have not been tested on Windows. A Java client and Java server are available in the java subdirectory, but they are not integrated into the normal build or built by default. There is a basic Makefile in that directory that may require some tweaking. It currently requires the Sun Java JDK (1.4.2, 5, or 6). To run the test suite, you will need Test::Pod as described above. The test suite will also need to be able to build to 127.0.0.1 on port 11119 and 14373 to run test network server programs. In order to fully test remctl, you will also need to create a keytab for a valid Kerberos principal in your local realm; see tests/data/README for more information. To check spelling in the POD documentation, Pod::Spell (available from CPAN) and either aspell or ispell with the american dictionary are also required. The user's path is searched for aspell or ispell and aspell is preferred. Spelling tests are disabled by default since spelling dictionaries differ too much between systems. To enable those tests, set RRA_MAINTAINER_TESTS to a true value. To bootstrap from a Git checkout, or if you change the Automake files and need to regenerate Makefile.in, you will need Automake 1.11 or later. For bootstrap or if you change configure.ac or any of the m4 files it includes and need to regenerate configure or config.h.in, you will need Autoconf 2.64 or later. Perl and xml2rfc are also required to generate the manual pages and protocol documentation from a fresh Git checkout. INSTALLATION (UNIX) You can build and install remctl with the standard commands: ./configure make make install Pass --enable-silent-rules to configure for a quieter build (similar to the Linux kernel). Use make warnings instead of make to build with full GCC compiler warnings (requires a relatively current version of GCC). The last step will probably have to be done as root. By default, remctl installs itself under /usr/local; you can change that path by passing the --prefix=PATH argument to configure. Solaris users should then look at examples/remctld.xml, an SMF manifest for running the remctld daemon. To also build the Perl bindings for the libremctl client library, pass the --enable-perl option to configure. The Perl module build is handled by the normal Perl extension build system, and therefore will be built with compiler flags defined by your Perl installation and installed into your local Perl module directory regardless of the --prefix argument to configure. To change this, you will need to run perl on Makefile.PL in the perl subdirectory of the build tree with appropriate options and rebuild the module after running make and before running make install. To also build the remctl PECL extension for PHP, pass the --enable-php option to configure. The PHP PECL module build is handled by the normal PHP extension build system and therefore will be installed into your local PHP module directory. The configure script will look for phpize on your PATH by default; if it's in some other directory, set the PHPIZE environment variable to the full path or set it on the configure command line. The configure script for the PECL extension will be run during the build instead of during configure. This is unfortunately apparently unavoidable given how the PECL build system works. To also build the Python bindings for the libremctl client library, pass the --enable-python option to configure. The Python module build is handled by the normal Python extension build system, and therefore will be installed into your local Python module directory regardless of the --prefix argument to configure. To change this, you will need to run python setup.py install by hand in the python directory with whatever options you want to use. To also build the Ruby bindings for the libremctl client library, pass the --enable-ruby option to configure. The Ruby module build is handled by the normal Ruby module build system, and therefore will be installed into your local Ruby module directory regardless of the --prefix argument to configure. To change this, override the sitedir variable on the make install command line, as in: make install sitedir=/opt/ruby Normally, configure will use krb5-config to determine the flags to use to compile with your Kerberos GSS-API libraries. If krb5-config isn't found, it will look for the standard Kerberos libraries in locations already searched by your compiler. If the the krb5-config script first in your path is not the one corresponding to the Kerberos libraries you want to use or if your Kerberos libraries and includes aren't in a location searched by default by your compiler, you need to specify --with-gssapi=PATH: ./configure --with-gssapi=/usr/pubsw You can also individually set the paths to the include directory and the library directory with --with-gssapi-include and --with-gssapi-lib. You may need to do this if Autoconf can't figure out whether to use lib, lib32, or lib64 on your platform. Note that these settings aren't used if a krb5-config script is found. To specify a particular krb5-config script to use, either set the KRB5_CONFIG environment variable or pass it to configure like: ./configure KRB5_CONFIG=/path/to/krb5-config To not use krb5-config and force library probing even if there is a krb5-config script on your path, set KRB5_CONFIG to a nonexistent path: ./configure KRB5_CONFIG=/nonexistent remctl will automatically build with PCRE support if pcre-config or the PCRE library are found. You can pass --with-pcre to configure to specify the root directory where PCRE is installed, or set the include and library directories separately with --with-pcre-include and --with-pcre-lib. You can also set PCRE_CONFIG to point to a different pcre-config script, or do similar things as with KRB5_CONFIG described above. remctl will automatically build with GPUT support if the GPUT header and library are found. You can pass --with-gput to configure to specify the root directory where GPUT is installed, or set the include and library directories separately with --with-gput-include and --with-gput-lib. You can build remctl in a different directory from the source if you wish. To do this, create a new empty directory, cd to that directory, and then give the path to configure when running configure. Everything else should work as above. Usage information is available in the manual pages which will be installed with remctl. You will need to set up a remctl.conf file for the server; see docs/remctl.conf for an example. The default location for remctl.conf is /etc, but can be changed with the --sysconfdir flag to configure. You can pass the --enable-reduced-depends flag to configure to try to minimize the shared library dependencies encoded in the binaries. This omits from the link line all the libraries included solely because the Kerberos libraries depend on them and instead links the programs only against libraries whose APIs are called directly. This will only work with shared Kerberos libraries and will only work on platforms where shared libraries properly encode their own dependencies (such as Linux). It is intended primarily for building packages for Linux distributions to avoid encoding unnecessary shared library dependencies that make shared library migrations more difficult. If none of the above made any sense to you, don't bother with this flag. The Java client and server aren't integrated with the regular build system. For information on building and installing them, see java/README. INSTALLATION (Windows) First, install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista if you have not already. This is a free download from Microsoft for users of "Genuine Microsoft Windows." The vcvars32.bat environment provided by Visual Studio may work as an alternative, but has not been tested. Next, install the MIT Kerberos for Windows SDK, available for download from http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dist/index.html. remctl has been tested with version 3.2.1 but should hopefully work with later versions. Then, follow these steps: 1. Run the InitEnv.cmd script included with the Windows SDK with parameters "/xp /release". 2. Run the configure.bat script, giving it as an argument the location of the Kerberos for Windows SDK. For example, if you installed the KfW SDK in "c:\KfW SDK", you should run: configure "c:\KfW SDK" 3. Run nmake to start compiling. You can ignore the warnings. If all goes well, you will have remctl.exe and remctl.dll. The latter is a shared library used by the client program. It exports the same interface as the UNIX libremctl library. TESTING remctl comes with an extensive test suite which you can run after building remctl with: make check In order to do more than limited tests of the low-level routines, you should first create a keytab for testing use containing the key for a principal in your local domain. See tests/data/README for instructions on what to create and where to place the files. If a test case fails, please run the that individual test case with verbose output using: tests/runtests -o and send me the output when reporting the problem. Note that on particularly slow or loaded systems, you may see intermittant failures from the server/streaming test because it's timing-sensitive. HOMEPAGE AND SOURCE REPOSITORY The remctl web page at: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/remctl/ will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources. remctl is maintained using Git. You can access the current source by cloning the repository at: git://git.eyrie.org/kerberos/remctl.git or view the repository via the web at: http://git.eyrie.org/?p=kerberos/remctl.git THANKS To Anton Ushakov for the original design document, much of the version one protocol design, and the initial implementation. To Roland Schemers for extensive review of the initial code and protocol and help with the original Java client. To Romain LENGLET for the idea and code for examples/rsh-wrapper. To Thomas Kula for testing of remctl 2.0 and later versions on NetBSD and Heimdal and for the Python bindings. To Ralf Wildenhues for help in getting make check to work with builddir != srcdir builds. To Darren Patterson and Digant Kasundra for contributions to the RPM spec file and testing on Red Hat. To Jonathan Kollasch for the initial IPv6 patch and for identifying all of the places the code was making IPv4 assuptions. To Andrew Mortensen for the initial -F and -k flag support for remctld. To Alf Wachsmann for catching inaccuracies in the Perl documentation. To Jeffrey Hutzelman and Chaskiel Grundman for testing with Heimdal 0.6 and teaching me a great deal about GSS-API flags and the security issues that surround them. To Marcus Watts for testing and various bug fixes, lots of improvements to the standalone server mode, and fixes for the Perl API. Marcus also rewrote the Java client, adding support for protocol version two and a server implementation. To Sandor Sklar for testing multiple patches for the remctl build on AIX 5.2 and providing an account so that I could investigate test suite issues. To Matthew Loar for the Windows port of the remctl client. To Andrew Mortensen for the initial remctl PECL extension for PHP and for general code formatting comments and a reminder to free malloc'd memory in the Python bindings. To Jeffrey Hutzelman for adding the framework for ACL method support and implementing the file, princ, deny, and gput schemes, as well as lots of testing and portability bug reports. To Timothy G. Abbott for suggesting additional restrictions on the names of files read when processing an include of a directory.