Supporting External Authentication in the Oracle OCI8 Extension

Michael B Allen wrote:

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Christopher Jones
christopher.jones@oracle.com wrote:

I've had a couple of recent requests for the OCI8 extension to support
"External Authentication" (aka OS authentication). I also recall a
discussion or two in the past, and there is at least one bug logged on
it.

Having external authentication would allow things like Kerberos to be
used for OCI8 authentication. This need is clearly growing but I'm not
in favor of having it always enabled in every web environment - I feel
another php.ini parameter looming :(

If anyone wants to be throw in some comments or help me re-evaluate
the pros and cons, drop me a line.

Some Oracle documentation discussing External Authentication is in:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/network.111/b28531/authentication.htm#CHDEGIFB

Chris

Hi Chris,

That's interesting but the scenario that is becoming more common and
is the case I'm interested in is using an existing credential to
initiate authentication with Oracle.

For example, using our extension a PHP script can acquire a Kerberos
credential either through delegation (eg. during SPNEGO
authentication), explicitly with a username and password (ie. get a
TGT) or implicitly from the HTTP service account keytab file. The
mod_auth_kerb module for Apache can also save the user's delegated
Kerberos credential if present. Then Kerberos aware clients (e.g.
pgsql_connect) look at the KRB5CCNAME environment variable and use
that ccache file to acquire credentials for the desired resource.

Does the PHP oci8 extension handle this scenario?

Mike

Without adding external authentication support, there is no support
for Kerberos at all.

Thanks for the use case.

Chris

--
Christopher Jones, Oracle
Email: christopher.jones@oracle.com Tel: +1 650 506 8630
Blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/ Free PHP Book: http://tinyurl.com/f8jad