Re: ipfw plus authentication (authpf is cool but....)





Norberto Meijome <freebsd@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 18:22:42 -0700 (PDT)
Mark Jayson Alvarez wrote:

Hi Nikos

Nikos Vassiliadis wrote: On Monday 03 April


hi there,
I mentioned DHCP registration - i found the link :
http://www.netreg.org/ it may do what you need.

I have already looked into it, as well as the CMU version of netreg which is far more feature rich and matured. http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg/
However, we are on the process of having a centralized LDAP directory of each equipment (including ip, mac address, os, owner, property number etc.) Both implementations uses a separate backend to store each machine's mac addresses. We don't want to have redundant data. Also, during our discussion:

"Another problem I am seeing with this kind of setup is that it doesn't prevent
someone from using other user's network information. There's not that much of
authentication happening in the process of dhcp. The server only looks if the
mac address is already registered(in my case, a simple ifconfig will allow me
to change my mac address to that of a registered user). There are a couple of
suggestions and workarounds to this however, and with these at hand, were're
only left with that redundancy issue.."




Our main problem is that in our company, each user has his own
workstation(no one else uses it).. However, due to poor
implementation of ip allocation strategy, any user can change his ip
to whatever ip address he wants, thus it would be hard for us to
really monitor who is doing this and who is doing that (because it
would be useless to see the ip address of the one who's eating up or
bandwidth or doing p2p when we cannot determine who is this user this
ip belongs to.

have you considered changing the policy in this regards? do users need
that much control over their own workstation?

According to the policy, the NMG is the only responsible for software installation, removal, patching etc of each workstation.. However, the MIS has very few manpower, they cannot have full control over all of the user's workstation. That's why we have proposed another policy that the user will be held responsible for every outcome that will be originating from his machine... be it p2p, or worm flooding.

> This leads us to our decision to have every user
assigned a static ip address and have him register his mac address,
all stored in ldap directory, and have him authenticate to the pc
router first before being allowed to access any server. Authpf is
somewhat close to this idea but perhaps it was designed for
environment wherein users have no permanent workstation, or user can
come from any location, even outside the company(at home).... I have
created a draft of my proposed solution:

First, user will
authenticate to a web based login form which is tied up against the
ip[f|fw|tables] ruleset.

can you run iptables on BSD?
| > When the user submits the form, the cgi will
then verify if the user is really who he claims to be by doing an
ldapbind using the credentials provided. Also, the script will check
if the request is coming from an ip address that is assigned to that
user, by comparing it to his ldap attributes (somewhat prevents users
from using other user's ip address).
If everything goes well, the
script will happily change the router's firewall ruleset to allow the
user to pass thru. (note that in our setup, we have allocated a
single class C ip block for all the staffs(120) (no need to have
separate blocks since all policies applies to all).



Also, we have
placed all the servers (mail, proxy, file, printer, im etc) in a
different block to make sure that authentication will happen first
before a user is allowed to access any of those servers.


and your pcrouter is the gateway between the users and the servers,
right? and different physical segment too




Yup.. just to make sure that they will have to get authenticated first before using any network services.. If they are known, that is the time when monitoring and accounting will make sense (since it is useless to know the ip address of the one doing p2p when we can't find out the user whom this ip is registered to.:-)



> Next, we
will also provide a logout form(the same as logging out from ssh
session in authpf) so that the ruleset can be reverted back when the
user does not want to access any network server anymore. The problem
with this is that users may be too lazy to logout to the network
authentication.. In authpf, even the user did not logout from his ssh
session, when he turns off his computer, the ssh session will
automatically be terminated. I'm thinking perhaps I can have a nagios
server constantly monitoring each user's network connectivity and
then changing the firewall ruleset once the user's machine is
unreacheable...

what if they leave their PC on overnight downloading / uploading files?
what if they leave their PC on , but logged out, so anyone else can
walk in and log in and use the already authorised pc? you may want to
have something that disables the firewall rule when the user logs out
(nagios agent on the client checking if the user is logged in,etc...)
Indeed.
> Another problem I am thinking is that, when a user
has already authenticated to the router and have his ip address
verified and has been allowed in the firewall, another smart user
might immediately change his ip/mac address to that of the
authenticated user, and thus making it hard to track his network
activity again..

and this will affect also the other user's connectivity, so there would
be some disruption.

I am assuming that you have unmanaged switches.... otherwise you could
should be able to create ACLs on the switch so only a client MAC
connects to each port and avoiding the 'switched IP' issue

Managed switches is not an option in our workplace. We don't have that much of luxury to spend on them. We have existing infrastructure where in unmanaged switches are cascading everywhere... That is why we have decided to just put them in a single block and create a standard policy for everyone..

> I'm still going to investigate if arpwatch can fill
this need....

good luck,
Beto



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