Kerberos authentication to load-balanced services in AWS and reverse DNS

Adam Lewenberg <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.encryption.kerberos.heimdal.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
The Stanford OpenLDAP service relies almost exclusively on GSSAPI 
authentication for its access control. This means clients doing LDAP 
searches use Kerberos. Normally, Kerberos authentication depends on 
specific DNS configuration.

----
Example: A client search

   ldapsearch -h ldap.stanford.edu uid=joeuser

1. The client resolves ldap.stanford.edu resolves to address 171.64.13.16

2. The client does a reverse DNS lookup on this IP address to get a 
hostname, in this case, ldap-lb.stanford.edu

3. If the hostname from step 2 does not match the host part of the 
principal in one of the entries on the server's keytab file, the 
Kerberos authentication will fail. In our example, 171.64.13.16 resolves 
to ldap-lb.stanford.edu, which is the name used in the keytab file, so 
everything is fine.
----

Because we control the IP addresses and DNS records on campus, it is no 
problem to make sure that the PTR (i.e., "reverse") DNS records are 
configured so that process works properly.

However, for services in the cloud this becomes more of a problem. It 
seems that Amazon Web Services does not give us the option to control 
the PTR DNS records to support Kerberos's reverse DNS authentication, at 
least not when we are using their ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) service.

1. One option is to require all of customers to use Kerberos with the 
reverse DNS lookup disabled. How much extra risk do we take on by not 
using the reverse DNS check?

2. Is there another way to configure our Kerberos and/or OpenLDAP so 
that clients using Kerberos with reverse DNS as part of the 
authentication process still works?

Thanks, Adam Lewenberg
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