Hi all,
being part of Commons Conservancy brought up yet another subject,
which is whether we should add a header with license information in
every file in the projects under idpy. This is not something done in
an abstract way, there is a specific format modelling this information
(see https://spdx.org/ and https://reuse.software/ - more specifically
https://reuse.software/practices/2.0/) Still, I find it problematic.
We want to open up the question to the wider community and consider
their thoughts on this. The forwarded message below is discussing this
subject. You can see the question we posed, the answer we got and my
comments. Feel free to tell us what you think on this.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 at 09:56
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: May 8, 2019, 8:15 AM -0700
>
> > Why does CC think having a single license file per project is
> > insufficient? Our thought is that if we can avoid adding a header to
> > every single file, that would be nice, esp. given we already have this
> > info in the license file and we have the Note Well.
>
>
> this is not just our opinion, but something that is an industry and
> community standard for legal compliance these days. When companies like
> Siemens, Samsung or Honeywell use some code in one of the hundreds or
> thousands of devices and systems in their product line, they need to be
> able to provide the correct license and a download of the exact version.
> This means machine readability too.
>
I've actually observed the opposite of that. Communities abandon the
"license in every file" model, and just use a single LICENSE file in
the root of the project. The LICENSE file contains license
information, that is, it is not a single license but it has exception
sections and so on.
> To quote from https://reuse.software/practices/2.0/ :
>
> Scroll to the section "2. Include a copyright notice and license in each
> file"...
>
> "Source code files are often reused across multiple projects, taken from
> their origin and repurposed, or otherwise end up in repositories where
> they are separate from its origin. You should therefore ensure that all
> files in your project have a comment header that convey that file’s
> copyright and license information: Who are the copyright holders and
> under which license(s) do they release the file?
>
Continuing from above, the standardization of package-management
formats and tools has helped exactly with that: to avoid distribution
of single files, and instead provide packages and modules. It is bad
practice and considered a hack to copy files. Nobody liked that model
and everyone is moving away; it is unstructured, it becomes
unmanageable and it will cause problems.
> It is highly recommended that you keep the format of these headers
> consistent across your files. It is important, however, that you do not
> remove any information from headers in files of which you are not the
> sole author.
>
> You must convey the license information of your source code file in a
> standardised way, so that computers can interpret it. You can do this
> with an SPDX-License-Identifier tag followed by an SPDX expression
> defined by the SPDX specifications."
>
> (the text goes on for a while after this, to clarify the point but this
> is the basic gist of it)
>
> There is a nice Python tool to check:
>
> https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
>
> I hope this makes sense
>
Well, it does not make complete sense. We're talking about licensing a
project. A project is not just code; there are data files (html, xml,
yaml, json files), binary files (archives/zip, images, audio, video,
etc), text files (configs, ini-files, etc) all "not-code". How do you
mark those files? Does the LICENSE file need a license-header? The
json format does not define comments, how do you add a header there?
If a binary file does not get a license header, why should a file with
code get one?
I would expect there to be a way to have the needed information
unified. If the files themselves cannot provide this information it
has to be external; thus the LICENSE file. If someone is worried about
somebody else re-using single files that do not have license
information (a python file, a png image, etc) there is really nothing
you can do (the DRM industry has been trying to solve for a long time;
and still your best bet is "social DRM").
Since, we're developing on open source with a permissive license, even
if someone does that, should we be happy that someone is actually
using what we built or sad that the files they copied did not have a
license header? And if they include the license information of that
copied file in their project's LICENSE file, is this solved?
Having pointed these contradictions, I am thinking that the "license
in every file" model seems to be a step backwards. It is introducing
overhead and does not really solve the problem, while at the same time
it enables a culture of bad practice (copying files around).
Cheers,
--
Ivan c00kiemon5ter Kanakarakis >:3
Hello everyone,
there has been a report on incident-response at idpy.org about a security
issue in PySaml2.
Alexey Sintsov and Yuri Goltsev from HERE Technologies reached out and
reported a XML Signature Wrapping (XSW) vulnerability. The issue
affects responses with signed assertions. PySaml2 can be tricked to
think that an assertion had been signed and use the assertion
information, when in reality the Signature points to another part of
the xml document that is controlled by another party.
The issue was assigned CVE-2020-5390 and is now fixed in the latest
pysaml2 release.
The relevant code commit that fixes is the issue:
https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/commit/5e9d5acbcd8ae45c4e736ac521…
Release v5.0.0 contains more changes, including:
- Add freshness period feature for MetaDataMDX
- Fix ipv6 validation to accommodate for addresses with brackets
- Fix xmlsec temporary files deletions
- Add method to get supported algorithms from metadata
- Add mdstore method to extract assurance certifications
- Add mdstore method to extract contact_person data
- Start dropping python2 support
Pointers to the release with changelog and more information, below:
- the relevant release commit:
https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/commit/f27c7e7a7010f83380566a219f…
- the github release:
https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/releases/tag/v5.0.0
- the pypi package:
https://pypi.org/project/pysaml2/5.0.0/
+ + + + + + + +
In more detail, regarding the XSW vulnerability:
libxml2 follows the xmldsig-core specification. The xmldsig
specification is way too
general. saml-core reuses the xmldsig specification, but constrains it to use of
specific facilities. The implementation of the SAML specification is
responsible to
enforce those constraints. libxml2/xmlsec1 are not aware of those
constraints and thus
process the document based on the full/general xmldsig rules.
What is happening is the following:
- xmldsig-core allows the signature-information and the data that was
signed to be in
different places. This works by setting the URI attribute of the
Reference element.
The URI attribute contains an optional identifier of the object
being signed. (see
"4.4.3 The Reference Element" --
https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core1/#sec-Reference)
This identifier is actually a pointer that can be defined in many
different ways; from
XPath expressions that need to be executed(!), to a full URL that
should be fetched(!)
in order to recalculate the signature.
- saml-core section "5.4 XML Signature Profile" defines constrains on
the xmldsig-core
facilities. It explicitly dictates that enveloped signatures are the
only signatures
allowed. This mean that:
* Assertion/RequestType/ResponseType elements must have an ID attribute
* signatures must have a single Reference element
* the Reference element must have a URI attribute
* the URI attribute contains an anchor
* the anchor points to the enclosing element's ID attribute
xmlsec1 does the right thing - it follows the reference URI pointer
and validates the
assertion. But, the pointer points to an assertion in another part of
the document; not
the assertion in which the signature is embedded/enveloped. SAML
processing thinks that
the signature is fine (that's what xmlsec1 said), and gets the
assertion data from the
assertion that contains the signature - but that assertion was never
validated. The
issue is that pysaml2 does not enforce the constrains on the signature
validation
facilities of xmldsig-core, that the saml-core spec defines.
The solution is simple; all we need is to make sure that assertions
with signatures (1)
contain one reference element that (2) has a URI attribute (3) that is
an anchor that
(4) points to the assertion in which the signature is embedded. If
those conditions are
met then we're good, otherwise we should fail the verification.
--
Ivan c00kiemon5ter Kanakarakis >:3
Hi Leif,
I added 2 pipes to buildin.py:
- publish_html creates static HTML views of IDPs and SPs, using XSLT based on Peter Schober’s alternative to MET;
- publish_split: similar to store, but added validUntil and creates signed XML-file per EntityDescriptor. This can be consumed dynamically by ADFS in an IDP role.
I put it directly into buildin.py because it shares some code with the sign pipe. Is this viable from your PoV - if yes, I would make an PR.
Cheers, Rainer
Attendees:
Roland, Ivan, Matthew, Heathter
1 - Administrivia
a. Website update - need to mention all the idpy OIDC projects, djangosaml2; Heather to check GitHub to see what else is missing from the website
1 - GitHub review
a. OIDC - https://github.com/IdentityPython (JWTConnect-Python-OidcRP, JWTConnect-Python-CryptoJWT, etc)
Roland has updated the federation libraries to match the spec. Will be running an interop event in the next few weeks
Working on a seminar re: the design architecture for the OIDC projects, but that will require some updates to the code to match the architecture he originally designed. The project has strayed a bit from the original design (which is an expected evolution). Roland will announce this on the idpy slack channel. Expect at least two hours. There will be a slide deck and/or notebook that will also be published.
grantmanager has been updated as per feedback from Giuseppe
b. Satosa - https://github.com/IdentityPython/SATOSA
Matthew haas aa reference implementation of Satosa in AWS. Working on getting approvals from his employer to publish it. Will be doing Internet2 TechEx ACAMP sessions on the docker image and how to use it to get started. It's similar tot the Shibboleth reference implementation on AWS. This is intended to show a quick start to Satosa. Will want to add on proper validation testing (unsure how to do that now).
c. pySAML2 - https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2
Planning to make a release (see updated document on how to publish a release). Will also name it alpha or beta to see how that works.
One big MR (https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/pull/877 - reformatting code, removed older python code, fixes as part of flake). Once this is done, will push the new docs out to readthedocs.
• pyupgrade to fix "legacy Pythonisms"
• autoflake to remove unused imports (either left behind by pyupgrade, or otherwise unused)
• flynt, to fix non-f-string string formatting
• flynt -tc, to fix string concatenation too (which is more intrusive and could be unsafe, but tests should catch things)
More changes in the queue:
• https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/pull/878 - response name id instead of response assertion name id; similar to issue 866. What's proposed directly in this PR isn't ideal for a broader audience; choices need to be explicit and under the implementer's control
• https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/pull/866 - changing the default behavior and requiring signed responses by default; there is a suggestion to not allow unsigned responses at all, but that makes testing harder. There's also a lot of broken stuff out there, so being able to turn signing off selectively is aa good debugging tool.
• https://github.com/IdentityPython/pysaml2/issues/879 - OpenSSL library updates (not related to the recent bug). Ivan wants to remove dependency on this library.
Will be diving into some of the older PRs after this new release.
Thanks! Heather
