[chef] Re: Re: Re: Client privileges

[Noah Kantrowitz < >]

Just about anything, restricting access to data bags or to cookbooks could 
have security implications, or having users that aren't full admins and can 
only see/edit a subset of the nodes. The issue with cookbook uploads not 
being locked down was supposed to be fixed already, I'll go investigate that 
now actually :-)

--Noah

On Jun 28, 2011, at 2:36 PM, Anthony Goddard wrote:

> Awesome, yep that's what I was looking for. Other than the concept of 
> different users managing different nodes or roles, what is a use case for 
> the hosted platform ACLs? Preventing a host from running a query for 
> example? This was obviously a big concern pre encrypted databags, but that 
> seems to be solved now.
> 
> A node being able to overwrite a cookbook is probably a concern, given they 
> could throw a cookbook in place of one in a base role and then that would 
> be it. Of course, having everything centrally managed by Chef server 
> probably means that you're going to have good insight into user accounts 
> and nice logging anyway, so this in some ways makes things more secure.
> 
> On Jun 28, 2011, at 14:26, Noah Kantrowitz 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
>> Assuming you mean the FOSS server (Hosted Chef has its own ACL system, so 
>> it can be locked down to within an inch of its life), a non-admin client 
>> can read all data from the server, perform searches (read: possible CPU 
>> DoS), and write to a node with the same name as the client (read: possible 
>> storage DoS). Hope that helps.
>> 
>> --Noah
>> 
>> On Jun 28, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Anthony Goddard wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi All,
>>> I'm poking around at the different privileges for admin / non admin users 
>>> / clients, mostly with a view to considering what happens if root 
>>> privileges are gained by a malicious user on a machine that's managed by 
>>> chef. I know the user can do a lot of queries using the client.pem but 
>>> can't write changes, though I'm not sure of the specifics.
>>> 
>>> I'm wondering if there's any more info around (haven't been able to find 
>>> it on the wiki) regarding exactly what the differences are between admin 
>>> users and regular users, what privileges a client has etc..
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Ant
>>> 
>>> 
>>