2.1 Scope and Roles
This chapter specifies PGSS Logon: the protocol by which a caller obtains a KACS token and a logon session from an authentication authority, and the protocol by which any program on the system resolves an identity it already holds into a name, a SID, or the attributes a POSIX program expects of one.
Two roles participate.
The authority is the process that listens on the logon socket. It decides whether a logon succeeds, mints the resulting token, creates the logon session, and answers identity lookups. There MUST be at most one authority on a running system.
The client connects and speaks on a principal's behalf. It proposes what kind of logon it wants, renders prompts and returns answers without interpreting them, and receives the token and installs it itself. A client is not trusted: everything it sends is a claim (§2.4).
The principal is the identity a logon is for — the person or service being authenticated. The principal is not a party to the conversation.
Both roles are publicly implementable. A third party MAY ship a different authority, a different logon originator, or both, and interoperate with the other half unchanged.
This chapter covers:
- the two channels an authority offers, and the access control governing each (§2.5, §2.14)
- message framing, header layout, and the rules under which the format may be extended (§2.6)
- the messages of the logon conversation, their fields, and their encodings (§2.7 to §2.10)
- the shape of a conversation: who speaks, in what order, and how it terminates (§2.3)
- the transfer of the minted token to the caller, and the session-profile values a logon originator needs in order to start a session (§2.9)
- credential handling obligations binding on both roles (§2.11, §2.12)
- what an authority MUST establish for itself rather than believe from a message (§2.4)
- resolving a principal to a name, a SID, a POSIX identifier, or the attributes a POSIX program expects of one (§2.13 to §2.18)
- how a bare name is resolved when more than one source could answer it (§2.15)
- the obligations binding on each role (§2.19)
This chapter does not cover:
- Tokens, SIDs, privileges, integrity levels, logon sessions, logon types, and access checks — described in the Peios Kernel TRM. SIDs and security descriptors are specified in PCDS.
- How an authority decides whether a credential is valid, where it keeps identity, which principals exist, or what they are called. Those belong to the authority's own design. Mainline's authority federates them over PSI, the Principal Source Interface, specified in PSPU §2.
- Password change, credential enrolment, and account administration, which are not specified.
- Service startup and ordering, described in the peinit TRM.
The distinction in the second point is the load-bearing one. PGSS Logon specifies how a caller asks and how an authority answers. It says nothing about how the authority reaches its answer, because that is exactly what different systems will do differently, and constraining it would make the standard a description of one implementation rather than a contract between two.
2.1.1 What the authority does not do #
An authority MUST NOT be a process factory. It does not fork the principal's shell, does not learn about controlling terminals, environments, or session leadership, and does not decide what the caller does with the token it receives.
The caller installs the token and proceeds. This keeps the most privileged process on the system out of the business of launching arbitrary programs, and it means a client can obtain a token for a purpose the authority need never have anticipated.
2.1.2 Authentication and derivation #
Two acts, deliberately separated.
Authentication establishes that the principal is who they claim. Its output is an identity and nothing more.
Derivation constructs the token: which SIDs it carries, which privileges, at what integrity level, with what projected identifiers. Its inputs are the authenticated identity and local policy.
The separation matters because the second is where a machine's own rules apply. An identity established elsewhere — by a directory, by a remote authority — does not carry entitlements onto this machine with it. What that identity means here is decided here, every time, by the authority applying local policy.
An authority MUST perform derivation itself. It MUST NOT accept a token, a privilege set, or an integrity level supplied by any other party, whatever its trust level.
2.1.3 The token this chapter does not describe #
This chapter governs the conversation and the delivery of its result. It does not govern the contents of the token that results. What SIDs, privileges, and integrity level a principal receives is derivation, and derivation is the authority's judgement applied to local policy.
A caller that receives a token from this protocol has been told who it may act as. It has not been told, and MUST NOT infer, anything further about how that conclusion was reached.