Kerberos authentication backend for Python Social Auth

This package provides Kerberos backend for Python Social Auth. It can be used to enable passwordless authentication inside a Django app or any other application that supports Python Social Auth. This is a pure Python implementation which doesn't depend on Apache mod_auth_kerb.

Installation

To install:

pip install social-auth-kerberos

WARNING: you will need gcc, Python and kerberos devel packages to build the gssapi dependency because it doesn't provide binary packages. Try dnf install gcc krb5-devel python3-devel (Red Hat/Fedora) or apt-get install gcc libkrb5-dev libpython3-dev (Debian/Ubuntu).

Configuration

Configure Python Social Auth and then make sure you have the following settings enabled:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    'social_auth_kerberos.backend.KerberosAuth',
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
]

SOCIAL_AUTH_KRB5_KEYTAB = '/Kiwi/your-application.keytab'

IMPORTANT:

The principal name for your Kiwi TCMS web service must be HTTP/<fqdn.example.com>@REALM.EXAMPLE.COM where fqdn.example.com is the domain name of the Kiwi TCMS server and REALM.EXAMPLE.COM is the Kerberos realm that is used in your organization.

/Kiwi/your-application.keytab is the keytab file for your web app principal! If you install this inside a Docker container make sure to chown 1001:root!

Pipeline configuration

Python Social Auth, and by extension this plugin, will create new user accounts upon first access of the web interface. In Kiwi TCMS users need to either be in the special group Tester or have sufficient permissions to add/edit/delete objects.

You can automatically assign new accounts to the Tester group if you append social_auth_kerberos.pipeline.initiate_defaults to the end of the SOCIAL_AUTH_PIPELINE setting.

WARNING: this is not done for you automatically because some administrators may want to employ different behaviour for newly registered accounts!

Kerberos configuration

For more information about Kerberos see:

• How to configure Firefox for kerberos
• How to configure kerberos on Fedora
• How to generate a keytab file

or check out tests/Dockerfile.kerberos.

Changelog

v0.3.0 (17 Dec 2023)

• Update gssapi from 1.6.12 to 1.8.3
• Update social-auth-core from 4.0.1 to 4.5.1
• Document the need to compile gssapi. Fixes Issue #3
• Build and test with Python 3.11, Kiwi TCMS v12.7
• Remove unused import

v0.2.4 (24 Mar 2020)

• Add social_auth_kerberos.pipeline with function to initialize default permissions for newly created accounts. See section Pipeline configuration
• Update README with more information how to configure this plugin
• Enable integration testing with Kerberos and coverage collection

v0.2.3 (22 Mar 2020)

• Keep a reference to current user before checking anything else. Resolves a crash for clients which know that the server is Kerberos enabled and directly send the Authorization header
• Be more tolerant to authorization request headers which don't match RFC-4459, section 4.2

v0.2.2 (10 Nov 2019)

• Pin license version to GPLv2 for Tidelift

v0.2.1 (10 Dec 2018)

• Initial release