How to handle authentication and authorization with thrift? - authentication

Question

I'm developing a system which uses thrift. I'd like clients identity to be checked and operations to be ACLed. Does Thrift provide any support for those?

Answer 1

Not directly. The only way to do this is to have an authentication method which creates a (temporary) key on the server, and then change all your methods so that the first argument is this key and they all additionally raise an not-authenticated error. For instance:
exception NotAuthorisedException {
1: string errorMessage,
}
exception AuthTimeoutException {
1: string errorMessage,
}
service MyAuthService {
string authenticate( 1:string user, 2:string pass )
throws ( 1:NotAuthorisedException e ),
string mymethod( 1:string authstring, 2:string otherargs, ... )
throws ( 1:AuthTimeoutException e, ... ),
}
We use this method and save our keys to a secured memcached instance with a 30min timeout for keys to keep everything "snappy". Clients who receive an AuthTimeoutException are expected to reauthorise and retry and we have some firewall rules to stop brute-force attacks.

Answer 2

Tasks like autorisation and permissions are not considered as a part of Thrift, mostly because these things are (usually) more related to the application logic than to a general RPC/serialization concept. The only Thing that Thrift supports out of the box right now is the TSASLTransport. I can't say much about that one myself, simply because I never felt the need to use it.
The other option could be to make use of THeaderTransport which unfortunately at the time of writing is only implemented with C++. Hence, if you plan to use it with some other language you may have to invest some additional work. Needless to say that we accept contributions ...

Answer 3

A bit late (I guess very late) but I had modified the Thrift Source code for this a couple of years ago.
Just submitted a ticket with the Patch to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-4221 for just this.
Have a look at that. Basically the proposal is to add a "BeforeAction" hook that does exactly that.
Example Golang generated diff
+ // Called before any other action is called
+ BeforeAction(serviceName string, actionName string, args map[string]interface{}) (err error)
+ // Called if an action returned an error
+ ProcessError(err error) error
}
type MyServiceClient struct {
## -391,7 +395,12 ## func (p *myServiceProcessorMyMethod) Process(seqId int32, iprot, oprot thrift.TP
result := MyServiceMyMethodResult{}
var retval string
var err2 error
- if retval, err2 = p.handler.MyMethod(args.AuthString, args.OtherArgs_); err2 != nil {
+ err2 = p.handler.BeforeAction("MyService", "MyMethod", map[string]interface{}{"AuthString": args.AuthString, "OtherArgs_": args.OtherArgs_})
+ if err2 == nil {
+ retval, err2 = p.handler.MyMethod(args.AuthString, args.OtherArgs_)
+ }
+ if err2 != nil {
+ err2 = p.handler.ProcessError(err2)