pam_xacml tutorial

Contact: pamxacml-developer@lists.sourceforge.net

Authors: Andreas Klenk, Tobias Heide

Documentation: Tobias Heide

Supported by: Universität Tübingen and Technische Universität München

pam_xacml includes work from Joseph Bester[1] within it‘s distribution.

About this document_________________________ 1

Installation_________________________________ 1

Configuration_______________________________ 1

Installation of SimplePDP_____________________ 1

See it work..._______________________________ 2

Further steps_______________________________ 2

Write your own policy                                            2

Read the documentation of pam_xacml           2

Read the source of pamxacml_test                   2

Contribute to pam_xacml                                     2

 

1.About this document

This document will give you a very short instruction, how to get pam_xacml running on a Linux system. If you need further assistance, please refer to the documentation of pam_xacml.

To gain full benefit of pam_xacml you will need to install a Policy Decision Point (PDP). There are some provided with pam_xacml, just refer to section four for an example.

2.Installation

On a clean Debian or Ubuntu installation, you would issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install libpam0g-dev libssl-dev libldap2-dev bison flex libxml2 libxml2-dev pkg-config libtool g++ bison flex autoconf automake patch

Then download gSOAP:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gsoap2/gsoap_2.7.10.tar.gz?modtime=1201451344&big_mirror=0

Install gSOAP:

tar -xvzf gsoap_2.7.10.tar.gz

cd gsoap-2.7

./configure --prefix=/usr

 make

 sudo make install

 cd ..

When done installing gSOAP you can progress with the download of pam_xacml.

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pamxacml/pamxacml-0.1-alpha.tbz?modtime=1219067417&big_mirror=0

Afterwards, install pam_xacml:

 tar -xvjf pamxacml-0.1-alpha.tbz

 cd pamxacml-0.1-alpha

 libtoolize

 aclocal

 autoheader

 autoconf

 automake -a -c --foreign

 ./configure --prefix=/usr

 make

 sudo make install

3.Configuration

Copy the file pamxacml_test from the dist/pam.d directory of the pam_xacml distribution to /etc/pam.d:

 sudo cp dist/pam.d/pamxacml_test /etc/pam.d

 sudo mkdir /etc/pamxacml

 sudo cp dist/templates/* /etc/pamxacml

Afterwards edit /etc/pam.d/pamxacml_test and comment out the very last line.

4.Installation of SimplePDP

Download JAXP_14_FCS from (sorry no direct link because of licensing issues) https://jaxp.dev.java.net/1.4/binaryDrops.html and place it in the directory PDP/SimplePDP/lib within pam_xacml. Then

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sunxacml/sunxacml-1.2.zip?modtime=1089936000&big_mirror=0

unzip sunxacml-1.2.zip

mv sunxacml-1.2/lib/* PDP/SimplePDP/lib/

wget http://www.apache.org/dist/xerces/j/Xerces-J-bin.2.9.1.tar.gz

tar -xvzf Xerces-J-bin.2.9.1.tar.gz

mv xerces-2_9_1/ PDP/SimplePDP/lib/

Now install java:

 sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Compile SimplePDP

cd PDP/SimplePDP

./build.sh

If you get error messages, make sure you placed the libraries into the correct directories.

5.See it work...

Now it‘s time to see pam_xacml work. Open up another console to start the provided PDP (called SimplePDP, located in PDP/SimplePDP within your pam_xacml distribution):

 ./execute.sh

You can now go back to your other console and change into the subdirectory tests/ of the distribution. Then call the program „pamxacml_test“:

cd tests/

./pamxacml_test

The output of the program should look as follows:

theide@kubuntu-clean:~/pamxacml-0.1-alpha/tests$ ./pamxacml_test

Test 0

pamAuthorisationConversation: Authorization Succeeded!

You will find some debug information in your system logs. If you want to switch that off, just disable the debug flag in the PAM-configuration of pamxacml_test.

6.Further steps

Write your own policy

The policy which SimplePDP uses when it comes with the distribution is located under PDP/SimplePDP/xacmlpolicy/obligationtest.xml. You can change the to any other file by editing the file called xacmlConfig.xml located in the SimplePDP-directory. Write your own policies to get started with XACML.

Read the documentation of pam_xacml

You will get a better understanding how you can configure pam_xacml to work in different scenarios. Also you will learn, what different kinds of PDPs pam_xacml can address.

Especially, have a look at the template request builder, which will help you to provide applications with XACML ablities, that don‘t know anything about it (they still have to use PAM, though).

Adopt your applications to make use of pam_xacml

It is easy to use pam_xacml from within your application. Please note tough, that pam_xacml is currently in an early alpha state and not suitable for production systems. To get more information about how to integrate PAM and pam_xacml within your application, refer to the PAM developer documents and to the pam_xacml developer handbook.

Read the source of pamxacml_test

It will give you a glimpse how to write your own applications that gain from using pam_xacml

Contribute to pam_xacml

Help us making pam_xacml better by providing bug reports or contributions to the source code.



[1] Joseph Besters original work can be found at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~bester/xacml/