Authentication
This page is a draft, please help complete it!
Introduction
The lab services and utilities used by mu2e require gaining and using several kinds of authentication. You will have one username for all computing purposes lab.
You login to the virtual machines with kerberos authentication. You will need a permanent ID called a kerberos "principal" which is looks like "xyz@FNAL.GOV", where xyz is your username. You will have a password associated with your principal. You will use this principal and password to log into the various personal linux desktops located at Fermilab or to ssh into the collaboration interactive machines from your home institution.
The second identity you will need is the services principal, which looks like xyz@services.fnal.gov, or often just xyz, and also has a password (different from your kerberos password). You will need this identity to log into Fermilab email, the servicedesk web site and some other services based at the lab. You would typically only use this authentication at the point you log into the service.
The third identity you will need is a CILogin certificate. This "cert" is the basis of authentication to the mu2e documents database, the computing farms, and a few other services. You will use this cert in two ways. The first way is to load it into your browser, which then gives you access to web pages and web services. The second is by using your kerberos authentication to access a copy of your certificate maintained in a remote database. You get this certificate once and then renew it only once a year.
hypernews is an archived blog and email list - for access here, you will need a hypernews password and your services password!
Finally, the mu2e internal web pages require a collaboration username and password, please ask your mu2e mentor.
If you need to do any computing in mu2e, please go ahead and start the procedure on the ComputingAccounts to create your accounts and authentication.
Kerberos
You login to the virtual machines with kerberos authentication. You will need a permanent ID called a kerberos "principal" which is looks like "xyz@FNAL.GOV", where xyz is your username. You will have a password associated with your principal. You will use this principal and password to log into the various personal linux desktops located at Fermilab or to ssh into the collaboration interactive machines from your home institution.
Your kerberos authentication is stored in a file
/tmp/krb5cc_`id -u`_*
where "*" will be a random string. Each time you ssh into a machine, it will produce a new file in /tmp for that process. The environmental KRB5CCNAME will point to the ticket file.
The ticket may be viewed with
klist
If you log into a lab desktop, you would typically user you username (just "xyz" without the "@FNAL.GOV") a new ticket is created. You can renew the ticket, or create it if you logged on my some other means, using
kinit
kinit takes an argument which is the user name (or full principle) and asked for you password. Tickets are "forwardable" by default. This means if you are logged into machine A with a ticket, and ssh to machine B, the ticket will also be moved to machine B, so you can ssh (or scp, etc) once you are on B.
Tickets are only valid for 26h and you typically refresh your kerberos authentication every day. This would normally happen as you log in to a desktop. If you have an ssh session from machine A to machine B, and leave the session up, you may renew the ticket on A, but the ticket on B will not automatically be updated. in this case, you can use
k5push <node>
to push your fresh ticket out though all ssh sessions and update the remote tickets.
There are two utilities in kerberos which we will only note here. One is kcron and kcroninit. These allows you to gain a kerberos ticket in a cron job. The other variant is the keytab file. This file can hold a ticket that is good for a year and can be accessed by anyone with access to the keytab file. This feature is not as secure, so it is usually only issued by the lab when needed, for example, in a group account.
Read more at the FNAL kerberos link. Reset password |here.
Services
The second identity you will need is the services principal, which looks like xyz@services.fnal.gov, or often just xyz, and also has a password (different from your kerberos password). You will need this identity to log into Fermilab email, the servicedesk web site, sharepoint and some other services based at the lab. You would typically only use this authentication at the point you log into the service and their is no local credential cache.
Certificate
For some interactive purposes on linux, via the command line or browsers, you will need a certificate to prove your identity. Our certificates are based on the CILogon Certification Authority (CA) which is geared to big science. Some of the systems which require cert authentication are jobsub job submission, ifdh data transfer and writing to the SAM database as part of file upload to tape.
You should have received a certificate as part of registering for computing accounts. The cert can be downloaded as a password-protected pem file and installed in your browser. Your cert is good for a year and only needs to be updated in your browser once a year.
When your cert is first created, it is also communicated to the lab which can then manage and provide the cert for you. When you access your cert at the linux command line, you usually access it from this cache.
kinit kx509
kinit makes sure your kerberos identity is valid, and kx509 uses that authentication to make a local, temporary copy of your cert, called a proxy, and writes it to a file named with your UID:
kx509 ls -l /tmp/x509up_u`id -u` -rw------- 1 rlc mu2e 8171 Aug 15 10:07 /tmp/x509up_u1311
It is this proxy, in this standard location, that commands can use to authenticate you. Note that jobsub and ifdh can automatically run kx509 for you if it is needed (so you only need to remember to kinit), however, samweb does not run kx509 automatically, and you will need to run it yourself if you get authentication errors.
kx509 is equivalent to
setup cigetcert cigetcert --institution="Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory"
which you might see some places. If you do not have a kerberos ticket when you run cigetcert, it will prompt you for your service password, and use that authentication to access your cert cache and make a copy.
You can print your certificate with
voms-proxy-info -all
Certificate Error
If you believe you have a valid certificate and you still see errors, for example,
Error creating dataset definition for ... 500 SSL negotiation failed: .
Then try removing the cert and recreating it.
kinit rm /tmp/x509up_u`id -u` kx509
The problem is that the proxy created by jobsub may require extra steps in authentication because it is "self-signed" by you. The cert created by kx509 is signed by the CILogon CA, and requires fewer steps to authenticate.
Proxies
A proxy is a copy of your certificate except that it expires quickly, usually in 12 or 24 hours. If a bad actor were to gain access to the proxy, they could only use it for the valid time, and they could not replicate it. The proxy is considered safer to pass around the grid and over networks. At the command line, we only use proxies.
Proxies created by kx509 are "plain" proxies, simple temporary copies of your cert. Here is what one print looks like:
subject : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/OU=People/CN=Raymond Culbertson/CN=UID:rlc issuer : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=CILogon/CN=CILogon Basic CA 1 identity : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=CILogon/CN=CILogon Basic CA 1 type : unknown strength : 2048 bits path : /tmp/x509up_u1311 timeleft : 167:59:40 key usage : Digital Signature, Key Encipherment, Data Encipherment
If you print your cert and see "subject' with an appendage like "/CN=2707985426" then this is a proxy, probably created with voms-proxy-init. It may also say "proxy" in the "type" field when printed. Certs created by kx509 are actually proxies, even though the word proxy and the "CN" tag doesn't appear. These are not fully RFC-compliant, which is the general, current standard, due to backwards compatibility, so have type "unknown". All our proxies may be called an "end-entity credential" which just means it is below a CA in the certificate chain.
The proxies created by jobsub and ifdh are voms proxies. voms is a system to track identities for uses on the grid. They have been "extended" with additional fields that can be considered part of your identity, such as your VO (Virtual Organization, i.e. your experiment) and your role ("Analysis" or "Production").
In our current procedures, uou should never need to do this directly, but if you want, you can create a voms proxy:
voms-proxy-init -noregen -rfc -voms fermilab:/fermilab/mu2e/Role=Analysis
This will create a proxy with an extension:
subject : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/OU=People/CN=Raymond Culbertson/CN=UID:rlc/CN=333302448 issuer : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/OU=People/CN=Raymond Culbertson/CN=UID:rlc identity : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/OU=People/CN=Raymond Culbertson/CN=UID:rlc type : RFC compliant proxy strength : 1024 bits path : /tmp/x509up_u1311 timeleft : 11:59:57 key usage : Digital Signature, Key Encipherment, Data Encipherment === VO fermilab extension information === VO : fermilab subject : /DC=org/DC=cilogon/C=US/O=Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/OU=People/CN=Raymond Culbertson/CN=UID:rlc issuer : /DC=org/DC=opensciencegrid/O=Open Science Grid/OU=Services/CN=voms2.fnal.gov attribute : /fermilab/mu2e/Role=Analysis/Capability=NULL attribute : /fermilab/mu2e/Role=NULL/Capability=NULL attribute : /fermilab/Role=NULL/Capability=NULL timeleft : 11:59:57 uri : voms2.fnal.gov:15001
The "fermilab" VO is used for all smaller experiments at the lab. In the fermilab VO, there is a "mu2e group".
Browsers
When you first get your certificate, you want to load it in your browsers. This is usually straightforward following the browser instructions. When you visit secure web sites, such as DocDB] or Jenkins, you may have to select the certificate to present to the web site.
When you connect to a secure web site that expects a certificate from you, that site will also present your browser with a certificate of its own. Your browser will then attempt to authenticate the certificate. If it cannot, it will open a dialog box telling you that it does not recognize the site's certificate and asking you if you would like to "add an exception". If you add the exception, then your browser will accept this site even though the browser cannot itself authenticate the certificate.
The way that your browser authenticates a certificate is that it contacts a recognized, trusted, Certificate Authority (CA). It then forwards the certificate in question to the CA and asks "Can I trust this?". If all is well, the CA replies that you can trust it. If your browser does not know the relevant CA to use, or if it does not trust the CA that the certificate says to use, then your browser will start the "add exception" dialog. Out of the box, your browser usually does not know much about which CAs to trust.
KCA
KCA refers to an old lab-based Certificate Authority system which is now disabled (2016).