_This feature is under development. Support for federation is limited to certain types of requests. The behaviors described here should not be interpreted as a stable API._
+Detailed configuration information is available on the "federation admin section":{{site.baseurl}}/admin/federation.html.
+
h2(#cluster_id). Cluster identifiers
-Clusters are identified by a five-digit alphanumeric id (numbers and lowercase letters). There are 36^5^ = 60466176 possible cluster identifiers.
+Clusters are identified by a five-digit alphanumeric id (numbers and lowercase letters). There are 36 ^5^ = 60466176 possible cluster identifiers.
* For automated tests purposes, use "z****"
* For experimental/local-only/private clusters that won't ever be visible on the public Internet, use "x****"
h3. Authenticating remote users with salted tokens
-When making a request to the home cluster, authorization is established by looking up the API token in the @api_client_authorizations@ table to determine the user identity. When making a request to a remote cluster, we need to provide an API token which can be used to establish the user's identity. The remote cluster will connect back to the home cluster to determine if the token valid and the user it corresponds to. However, we do not want to send along the same API token used for the original request. If the remote cluster is malicious or compromised, sending along user's regular token would compromise the user account on the home cluster. Instead, the controller sends a "salted token". The salted token is restricted to only to fetching the user account and group membership. The salted token consists of the uuid of the token in @api_client_authorizations@ and the SHA1 HMAC of the original token and the cluster id of remote cluster. To verify the token, the remote cluster contacts the home cluster and provides the token uuid, the hash, and its cluster id. The home cluster uses the uuid to look up the token re-computes the SHA1 HMAC of the original token and cluster id. If that hash matches, the the token is valid. To avoid having to re-validate the token on every request, it is cached for a short period.
+When making a request to the home cluster, authorization is established by looking up the API token in the @api_client_authorizations@ table to determine the user identity. When making a request to a remote cluster, we need to provide an API token which can be used to establish the user's identity. The remote cluster will connect back to the home cluster to determine if the token valid and the user it corresponds to. However, we do not want to send along the same API token used for the original request. If the remote cluster is malicious or compromised, sending along user's regular token would compromise the user account on the home cluster. Instead, the controller sends a "salted token". The salted token is restricted to only to fetching the user account and group membership. The salted token consists of the uuid of the token in @api_client_authorizations@ and the SHA1 HMAC of the original token and the cluster id of remote cluster. To verify the token, the remote cluster contacts the home cluster and provides the token uuid, the hash, and its cluster id. The home cluster uses the uuid to look up the token re-computes the SHA1 HMAC of the original token and cluster id. If that hash matches, then the token is valid. To avoid having to re-validate the token on every request, it is cached for a short period.
The security properties of this scheme are:
projects / arvados.git / blobdiff