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Chapter 1. Introduction to Identity Management
Red Hat Identity Management is a way to create identity stores, centralized authentication, domain control for Kerberos and DNS services, and authorization policies — all on Linux systems, using native Linux tools. While centralized identity/policy/authorization software is hardly new, Identity Management is one of the only options that supports Linux/Unix domains.
Identity Management provides a unifying skin for standards-defined, common network services, including PAM, LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, NTP, and certificate services, and it allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to serve as the domain controllers.
Identity Management defines a domain, with servers and clients who share centrally-managed services, like Kerberos and DNS. This chapter first explains what Identity Management is.
1.1. A Working Definition for Identity Management
At the most basic level, Red Hat Identity Management is a domain controller for Linux and Unix machines. Identity Management defines the domain, using controlling servers and enrolled client machines. This provides centralized structure that has previously been unavailable to Linux/Unix environments, and it does it using native Linux applications and protocols.
Security information frequently relates to identities of users, machines, and services. Once the identity is verified, then access to services and resources can be controlled.
For efficiency, risk management, and ease of administration, IT administrators try to manage identities as centrally as possible and to unite identity management with authentication and authorization policies. Historically, Linux environments have had a very difficult time establishing this centralized management. There are a number of different protocols (such as NIS and Kerberos) which define domains, while other applications store data (such as LDAP) and still others manage access (such as sudo). None of these applications talk to each other or use the same management tools. Every application had to be administered separately and it had to be managed locally. The only way to get a consistent identity policy was to copy configuration files around manually or to try to develop a proprietary application to manage identities and policies.
The goal of Identity Management is to simplify that administrative overhead. Users, machines, services, and polices are all configured in one place, using the same tools. Because IPA creates a domain, multiple machines can all use the same configuration and the same resources simply by joining the domain. Users only have to sign into services once, and administrators only have to manage a single user account.
IPA does three things:
- Create a Linux-based and Linux-controlled domain. Both IPA servers and IPA clients are Linux or Unix machines. While IPA can synchronize data with an Active Directory domain to allow integration with Windows servers, it is not an administrative tools for Windows machines and it does not support Windows clients. Identity Management is a management tool for Linux domains.
- Centralize identity management and identity policies.
- Build on existing, native Linux applications and protocols. While IPA has its own processes and configuration, its underlying technologies are familiar and trusted by Linux administrators and are well established on Linux systems.
In a sense, Identity Management isn't making administrators do something new; it is helping them do it better. There are a few ways to illustrate that.
On one extreme is the low control environment. Little Example Corp. has several Linux and Unix servers, but each one is administered separately. All passwords are kept on the local machine, so there is no central identity or authentication process. Tim the IT Guy just has to manage users on every machine, set authentication and authorization policies separately, and maintain local passwords. With IPA, things come to order. There is a simple way to have central user, password, and policy stores, so Tim the IT Guy only has to maintain the identities on one machine (the IPA server) and users and policies are uniformly applied to all machines. Using host-based access control, delegation, and other rules, he can even set different access levels for laptops and remote users.
In the middle is the medium control environment. Mid-Example Corp. has several Linux and Unix servers, but Bill the IT Guy has tried to maintain a greater degree of control by creating a NIS domain for machines, an LDAP directory for users, and Kerberos for authentication. While his environment is well under control, every application has to be maintained separately, using different tools. He also has to update all of the services manually whenever a new machine is added to his infrastructure or when one is taken offline. In this situation, IPA greatly reduces his administrative overhead because it integrates all of the different applications together seamlessly, using a single and simplified tool set. It also makes it possible for him to implement single sign-on services for all of the machines in his domain.
On the other extreme is the absent control environment. At Big Example Corp., most of the systems are Windows based and are managed in a tightly-knit Active Directory forest. However, development, production, and other teams have many Linux and Unix systems — which are basically excluded from the Windows controlled environment. IPA brings native control to the Linux/Unix servers, using their native tools and applications — something that is not possible in an Active Directory forest. Additionally, because IPA is Windows-aware, data can be synchronized between Active Directory and IPA, preserving a centralized user store.
IPA provides a very simple solution to a very common, very specific problem: identity management.
