System Administration Guide: Network Services

ProcedureHow to Set Up a Secure NFS Environment With DH Authentication

  1. Assign your domain a domain name, and make the domain name known to each computer in the domain.

    See the System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP) if you are using NIS+ as your name service.

  2. Establish public keys and secret keys for your clients' users by using the newkey or nisaddcred command. Have each user establish his or her own secure RPC password by using the chkey command.


    Note –

    For information about these commands, see the newkey(1M), the nisaddcred(1M), and the chkey(1) man pages.


    When public keys and secret keys have been generated, the public keys and encrypted secret keys are stored in the publickey database.

  3. Verify that the name service is responding.

    If you are running NIS+, type the following:


    # nisping -u
    Last updates for directory eng.acme.com. :
    Master server is eng-master.acme.com.
            Last update occurred at Mon Jun  5 11:16:10 1995
    
    Replica server is eng1-replica-replica-58.acme.com.
            Last Update seen was Mon Jun  5 11:16:10 1995

    If you are running NIS, verify that the ypbind daemon is running.

  4. Verify that the keyserv daemon of the key server is running.

    Type the following command.


    # ps -ef | grep keyserv
    root    100      1  16    Apr 11 ?        0:00 /usr/sbin/keyserv
    root   2215   2211   5  09:57:28 pts/0    0:00 grep keyserv

    If the daemon is not running, start the key server by typing the following:


    # /usr/sbin/keyserv
    
  5. Decrypt and store the secret key.

    Usually, the login password is identical to the network password. In this situation, keylogin is not required. If the passwords are different, the users have to log in, and then run keylogin. You still need to use the keylogin -r command as root to store the decrypted secret key in /etc/.rootkey.


    Note –

    You need to run keylogin -r if the root secret key changes or if /etc/.rootkey is lost.


  6. Update mount options for the file system.

    For Diffie-Hellman authentication, edit the /etc/dfs/dfstab file and add the sec=dh option to the appropriate entries.


    share -F nfs -o sec=dh /export/home
    

    See the dfstab(4) man page for a description of /etc/dfs/dfstab.

  7. Update the automounter maps for the file system.

    Edit the auto_master data to include sec=dh as a mount option in the appropriate entries for Diffie-Hellman authentication:


    /home	auto_home	-nosuid,sec=dh

    Note –

    Releases through Solaris 2.5 have a limitation. If a client does not securely mount a shared file system that is secure, users have access as nobody rather than as themselves. For subsequent releases that use version 2, the NFS server refuses access if the security modes do not match, unless -sec=none is included on the share command line. With version 3, the mode is inherited from the NFS server, so clients do not need to specify sec=dh. The users have access to the files as themselves.


    When you reinstall, move, or upgrade a computer, remember to save /etc/.rootkey if you do not establish new keys or change the keys for root. If you do delete /etc/.rootkey, you can always type the following:


    # keylogin -r