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+
+rpcsec_gss support for kernel RPC servers
+=========================================
+
+This document gives references to the standards and protocols used to
+implement RPCGSS authentication in kernel RPC servers such as the NFS
+server and the NFS client's NFSv4.0 callback server.  (But note that
+NFSv4.1 and higher don't require the client to act as a server for the
+purposes of authentication.)
+
+RPCGSS is specified in a few IETF documents:
+ - RFC2203 v1: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2203.txt
+ - RFC5403 v2: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5403.txt
+and there is a 3rd version  being proposed:
+ - http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-williams-rpcsecgssv3.txt
+   (At draft n. 02 at the time of writing)
+
+Background
+----------
+
+The RPCGSS Authentication method describes a way to perform GSSAPI
+Authentication for NFS.  Although GSSAPI is itself completely mechanism
+agnostic, in many cases only the KRB5 mechanism is supported by NFS
+implementations.
+
+The Linux kernel, at the moment, supports only the KRB5 mechanism, and
+depends on GSSAPI extensions that are KRB5 specific.
+
+GSSAPI is a complex library, and implementing it completely in kernel is
+unwarranted. However GSSAPI operations are fundementally separable in 2
+parts:
+- initial context establishment
+- integrity/privacy protection (signing and encrypting of individual
+  packets)
+
+The former is more complex and policy-independent, but less
+performance-sensitive.  The latter is simpler and needs to be very fast.
+
+Therefore, we perform per-packet integrity and privacy protection in the
+kernel, but leave the initial context establishment to userspace.  We
+need upcalls to request userspace to perform context establishment.
+
+NFS Server Legacy Upcall Mechanism
+----------------------------------
+
+The classic upcall mechanism uses a custom text based upcall mechanism
+to talk to a custom daemon called rpc.svcgssd that is provide by the
+nfs-utils package.
+
+This upcall mechanism has 2 limitations:
+
+A) It can handle tokens that are no bigger than 2KiB
+
+In some Kerberos deployment GSSAPI tokens can be quite big, up and
+beyond 64KiB in size due to various authorization extensions attacked to
+the Kerberos tickets, that needs to be sent through the GSS layer in
+order to perform context establishment.
+
+B) It does not properly handle creds where the user is member of more
+than a few housand groups (the current hard limit in the kernel is 65K
+groups) due to limitation on the size of the buffer that can be send
+back to the kernel (4KiB).
+
+NFS Server New RPC Upcall Mechanism
+-----------------------------------
+
+The newer upcall mechanism uses RPC over a unix socket to a daemon
+called gss-proxy, implemented by a userspace program called Gssproxy.
+
+The gss_proxy RPC protocol is currently documented here:
+
+	https://fedorahosted.org/gss-proxy/wiki/ProtocolDocumentation
+
+This upcall mechanism uses the kernel rpc client and connects to the gssproxy
+userspace program over a regular unix socket. The gssproxy protocol does not
+suffer from the size limitations of the legacy protocol.
+
+Negotiating Upcall Mechanisms
+-----------------------------
+
+To provide backward compatibility, the kernel defaults to using the
+legacy mechanism.  To switch to the new mechanism, gss-proxy must bind
+to /var/run/gssproxy.sock and then write "1" to
+/proc/net/rpc/use-gss-proxy.  If gss-proxy dies, it must repeat both
+steps.
+
+Once the upcall mechanism is chosen, it cannot be changed.  To prevent
+locking into the legacy mechanisms, the above steps must be performed
+before starting nfsd.  Whoever starts nfsd can guarantee this by reading
+from /proc/net/rpc/use-gss-proxy and checking that it contains a
+"1"--the read will block until gss-proxy has done its write to the file.