The OpenStack Identity Service (Keystone) supports multiple methods of authentication, including username & password, LDAP, and external authentication methods.  Upon successful authentication, Keystone provides the user with an authorization token used for subsequent service requests. Transport Layer Security TLS/SSL provides authentication between services and persons using X.509 certificates.  Although the default mode for SSL is server-side only authentication, certificates may also be used for client authentication.

Keystone does not provide a method to limit access to accounts after repeated unsuccessful login attempts. Repeated failed login attempts are likely brute-force attacks (Refer figure Attack-types). This is a more significant issue in Public clouds. Prevention is possible by using an external authentication system that blocks out an account after some configured number of failed login attempts. The account then may only be unlocked with further side-channel intervention. If prevention is not an option, detection can be used to mitigate damage.Detection involves frequent review of access control logs to identify unauthorized attempts to access accounts. Possible remediation would include reviewing the strength of the user password, or blocking the network source of the attack via firewall rules. Firewall rules on the keystone server that restrict the number of connections could be used to reduce the attack effectiveness, and thus dissuade the attacker. In addition, it is useful to examine account activity for unusual login times and suspicious actions, with possibly disable the account. Often times this approach is taken by credit card providers for fraud detection and alert.

Employ multi-factor authentication for network access to privileged user accounts. Keystone supports external authentication services through the Apache web server that can provide this functionality. Servers may also enforce client-side authentication using certificates. This recommendation provides insulation from brute force, social engineering, and both spear and mass phishing attacks that may compromise administrator passwords.

Keystone can store user credentials in an SQL Database, or may use an LDAP-compliant directory server. The Keystone database may be separate from databases used by other OpenStack services to reduce the risk of a compromise of the stored credentials. When authentication is provided via username and password, Keystone does not enforce policies on password strength, expiration, or failed authentication attempts as recommended by NIST Special Publication 800-118 (draft). Organizations that desire to enforce stronger password policies should consider using Keystone Identity Service Extensions or external authentication services. LDAP simplifies integration of Keystone authentication into an organization's existing directory service and user account management processes. Authentication and authorization policy in OpenStack may be delegated to an external LDAP server. A typical use case is an organization that seeks to deploy a private cloud and already has a database of employees, the users. This may be in an LDAP system. Using LDAP as a source of authority authentication, requests to Keystone are delegated to the LDAP service, which will authorize or deny requests based on locally set policies. A token is generated on successful authentication. Note that if the LDAP system has attributes defined for the user such as admin, finance, HR etc, these must be mapped into roles and groups within Keystone for use by the various OpenStack services. The etc/keystone.conf file provides the mapping from the LDAP attributes to Keystone attributes. Keystone MUST NOT be allowed to write to LDAP services used for authentication outside of the OpenStack deployment as this would allow a sufficiently privileged keystone user to make changes to the LDAP directory. This would allow privilege escalation within the wider organization or facilitate unauthorized access to other information and resources. In such a deployment, user provisioning would be out of the realm of the OpenStack deployment. There is an OpenStack Security Note (OSSN) regarding keystone.conf permissions. There is an OpenStack Security Note (OSSN) regarding potential DoS attacks.

Organizations may desire to implement external authentication for compatibility with existing authentication services or to enforce stronger authentication policy requirements. Although passwords are the most common form of authentication, they can be compromised through numerous methods, including keystroke logging and password compromise. External authentication services can provide alternative forms of authentication that minimize the risk from weak passwords. These include: Password Policy Enforcement: Requires user passwords to conform to minimum standards for length, diversity of characters, expiration, or failed login attempts. Multi-factor authentication: The authentication service requires the user to provide information based on something they have (e.g., a one-time password token or X.509 certificate) and something they know (e.g., a password). Kerberos

Keystone supports the notion of groups and roles. Users belong to groups. A group has a list of roles. OpenStack services reference the roles of the user attempting to access the service. The OpenStack policy enforcer middleware takes into consideration the policy rule associated with each resource and the user's group/roles and tenant association to determine if he/she has access to the requested resource. The Policy enforcement middleware enables fine-grained access control to OpenStack resources. Only admin users can provision new users and have access to various management functionality. The cloud tenant would be able to only spin up instances, attach volumes, etc.

Prior to configuring roles, groups, and users, document your required access control policies for the OpenStack installation. The policies should be consistent with any regulatory or legal requirements for the organization. Future modifications to access control configuration should be done consistently with the formal policies. The policies should include the conditions and processes for creating, deleting, disabling, and enabling accounts, and for assigning privileges to the accounts. Periodically review the policies and ensure that configuration is in compliance with approved policies.

As described in the OpenStack Cloud Administrator Guide, cloud administrators must define a user for each service, with a role of Admin. This service user account provides the service with the authorization to authenticate users. The Nova and Swift services can be configured to use either the "tempAuth" file or Keystone to store authentication information. The "tempAuth" solution MUST NOT be deployed in a production environment since it stores passwords in plain text. Keystone supports client authentication for SSL which may be enabled. SSL client authentication provides an additional authentication factor, in addition to the username / password, that provides greater reliability on user identification. It reduces the risk of unauthorized access when usernames and passwords may be compromised.  However, there is additional administrative overhead and cost to issue certificates to users that may not be feasible in every deployment. NOTE: We recommend using client authentication using SSL for the authentication of services to Keystone. The cloud administrator should protect sensitive configuration files for unauthorized modification. This can be achieved with mandatory access control frameworks such as SELinux, including /etc/keystone.conf and X.509 certificates.

We recommend that admin users authenticate using Keystone and an external authentication service that supports 2-factor authentication, such as a certificate.  This reduces the risk from passwords that may be compromised. This recommendation is in compliance with NIST 800-53 IA-2(1) guidance in the use of multifactor authentication for network access to privileged accounts.

Keystone can directly provide end-user authentication, or can be configured to use external authentication methods to conform to an organization's security policies and requirements.

Each OpenStack service has a policy file in json format, called policy.json. The policy file specifies rules, and the rule that governs each resource. A resource could be API access, the ability to attach to a volume, or to fire up instances. The policies can be updated by the cloud administrator to further control access to the various resources. The middleware could also be further customized. Note that your users must be assigned to groups/roles that you refer to in your policies. Below is a snippet of the Cinder service policy.json file.   { "context_is_admin": [["role:admin"]], "admin_or_owner": [["is_admin:True"], ["project_id:%(project_id)s"]], "default": [["rule:admin_or_owner"]], "admin_api": [["is_admin:True"]], "volume:create": [], "volume:get_all": [], "volume:get_volume_metadata": [], "volume:get_snapshot": [], "volume:get_all_snapshots": [], "volume_extension:types_manage": [["rule:admin_api"]], "volume_extension:types_extra_specs": [["rule:admin_api"]], ... } Note the default rule specifies that the user must be either an admin or the owner of the volume. It essentially says only the owner of a volume or the admin may create/delete/update volumes. Certain other operations such as managing volume types are accessible only to admin users.

Once a user is authenticated, a token is generated and used internally in OpenStack for authorization and access. The default token lifespan is 24 hours. It is recommended that this value be set lower but caution needs to be taken as some internal services will need sufficient time to complete their work. The cloud may not provide services if tokens expire too early. An example of this would be the time needed by Nova to transfer a disk image onto the hypervisor for local caching. The Identity service could alternatively be configured to provide UUID tokens which are significantly shorter but may be less secure depending on your specific deployment model. Decisions about token implementation should take into consideration the level of trust needed within a given security domain. Below is an example of a PKI token. Note that, in practice, the token id value is very long (e.g., around 3500 bytes), but for brevity we shorten it in this example.   "token": { "expires": "2013-06-26T16:52:50Z", "id": "MIIKXAY...", "issued_at": "2013-06-25T16:52:50.622502", "tenant": { "description": null, "enabled": true, "id": "912426c8f4c04fb0a07d2547b0704185", "name": "demo" } } Note that the token is often passed within the structure of a larger context of a Keystone response. These responses also provide a catalog of the various OpenStack services. Each service is listed with its name, access endpoints for internal, admin, and public access. Keystone supports token revocation. This manifests as an API to revoke a token, to list revoked tokens and individual OpenStack services that cache tokens to query for the revoked tokens and remove them from their cache and append the same to their list of cached revoked tokens.

Domains are high-level containers for projects, users and groups. As such, they can be used to centrally manage all Keystone-based identity components. With the introduction of account Domains, server, storage and other resources can now be logically grouped into multiple Projects (previously called Tenants) which can themselves be grouped under a master account-like container. In addition, multiple users can be managed within an account Domain and assigned roles that vary for each Project. Keystone's V3 API supports multiple domains. Users of different domains may be represented in different authentication backends and even have different attributes that must be mapped to a single set of roles and privileges, that are used in the policy definitions to access the various service resources. Where a rule may specify access to only admin users and users belonging to the tenant, the mapping may be trivial. In other scenarios the cloud administrator may need to approve the mapping routines per tenant.