Proposals

Learning your authN-Zs

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Proposal
Cooking
Short form
osb2009-0181
Session notes

Excerpt

How I learned to stop worrying and love Kerberos and LDAP

Description

Maybe you think OpenID is the New Hotness, or that OAuth invented the concept of delegated access to protected resources. Maybe you finally figured out how to push your public SSH key onto a server so you can log in without using a password, and you think you’ve found the latest-and-greatest in secure, convenient remote systems access.

Here’s the thing: the old-skool UNIX crowd had single-sign on, secure access delegation, and ways to selectively share account information across multiple machines and networks all worked out 15 years ago. Heck, even Microsoft figured it out before you did.

The secret to all this wizardry? Two simple, orthogonal technologies which taste great together: Kerberos and LDAP. Before you run off an reinvent the wheel (badly), or cook up some form of (broken) one-off credential storage mechanism, you should know about these tools, why they’re probably better than anything you’ve dreamed up, and how they not only work with web applications, but in fact make them more secure, easier to maintain, and just plain better.

Tags

security, systems, Unix, posix, ldap, kerberos

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Speaker

  • 2866458169_7364da7440_o

    Lennon Day-Reynolds

    Dark Horse Comics

    Biography

    Lennon Day-Reynolds recently joined Dark Horse Comics as a software developer, fulfilling a life-long dream of combining his love of nerdy pop culture with software and the Internet. He currently works on digital publishing, e-commerce, and back-office applications for Dark Horse and its sister company, Things From Another World. He has a decade of experience building systems for organizations ranging from small non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations using open source operating systems, infrastructure, and programming languages.

    Sessions