Authenticating a docker container against host’s UNIX accounts

Recently, with the advent of Docker and similar technologies, there’s been an effort to containerize different kinds of setups that previously were running on a single machine or a set of tightly coupled machines. In case the components communicate over a network connection, the containerization might not be that hard, but what about cases where the components would talk over a strictly local interface, such as a UNIX socket?

A colleague of mine asked me to help setup up a container to authenticate against the host’s UNIX accounts using the PAM API the other day. It turned out to be doable, but maybe not obvious to anyone not familiar with some of the more esoteric SSSD options, so I’d like to write down the instructions in a blog post.

In our setup, there was a pam service, sss_test, that previously would run on the host and authenticate against accounts either locally stored on the hosts in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. The same setup could in principle be used to authenticate against a remote database using SSSD, just the host SSSD settings would be different.

So how does this work with containers? One possibility, especially with a remote database such as IPA or AD would be to run an SSSD instance in every container and authenticate to the remote store. But that doesn’t help us with cases where we’d like to authenticate against the local database stored on the host, since it’s not exposed outside the host. Moreover, putting SSSD into each container might also mean we’d need to put a keytab in each container, then each container would open its separate connection to the remote just gets tedious. But let’s focus on the local accounts..

The trick we’ll use is bind-mounting. It’s possible to mount part of host’s filesystem into the container’s filesystem and we’ll leverage this to bind-mount the UNIX sockets SSSD communicates over into the container. This will allow the SSSD client side libraries to authenticate against the SSSD running on the host. Then, we’ll set up SSSD on the host to authenticate aganst the hosts’s UNIX files with the proxy back end.

This is the traditional schema:
application -> libpam -> pam_authenticate -> -> /etc/passwd

If we add SSSD to the mix, it becomes:
application -> libpam -> pam_authenticate -> -> SSSD -> -> /etc/passwd

Let’s configure the host and the container, step by step.

  1. Host config
    1. Install packages
    2. yum -y install sssd-common sssd-proxy

    3. create a PAM service for the container.
    4. The name doesn’t matter, it just needs to be referenced from sssd.conf later.
      # cat /etc/pam.d/sss_proxy
      auth required
      account required
      password required
      session required

    5. create SSSD config file, /etc/sssd/sssd.conf
    6. Please note that the permissions must be 0600 and the file must be owned by root.root.
      # cat /etc/sssd/sssd.conf
      services = nss, pam
      config_file_version = 2
      domains = proxy
      id_provider = proxy
      # The proxy provider will look into /etc/passwd for user info
      proxy_lib_name = files
      # The proxy provider will authenticate against /etc/pam.d/sss_proxy
      proxy_pam_target = sss_proxy

    7. start sssd
    8. # systemctl start sssd

    9. verify a user can be retrieved with sssd
    10. $ getent passwd -s sss localuser

  2. Container setup
  3. It’s important to bind-mount the /var/lib/sss/pipes directory from the host to the container since the SSSD UNIX sockets are located there.

    # docker run -i -t -v=/var/lib/sss/pipes/:/var/lib/sss/pipes/:rw --name sssd-cli fedora:latest /bin/sh

  4. Container config
  5. The container runs the PAM-aware application that authenticates against the host. I used a simple program in C that comes from the SSSD source. It pretty much just runs pam_authenticate() against a service called sss_test. Your application might need a different service, but then you just need to adjust the filename in /etc/pam.d/ in the container. All the steps below should be executed on the container itself.

    1. install only the sss client libraries
    2. # yum -y install sssd-client

    3. make sure sss is configured for passwd and group databases in /etc/nsswitch.conf
    4. # grep sss /etc/nsswitch.conf

    5. configure the PAM service that the application uses to call into SSSD

    6. # cat /etc/pam.d/sss_test
      auth required
      account required
      password required
      session required

    7. authenticate using your PAM application.
    8. In my case that was
      # ./pam_test_client auth localtest
      action: auth
      user: localtest
      testing pam_authenticate
      pam_authenticate: Success

  6. Profit!

It would be possible to authenticate against any database, just by changing what the SSSD on the host authenticates against. There’s several gotchas, though, especially should you require that only certain containers are allowed to retrieve users from certain domains. Multitenancy doesn’t really work well, because we don’t have a good mechanism to retrieve the identity of the container.


3 thoughts on “Authenticating a docker container against host’s UNIX accounts

  1. How about user namespaces? What if my container has user ‘root’ which is mapped to user123456 on my host. How would that work?


    1. To be honest, I haven’t tested that. Could you pass me a link how to set up the namespacing?

      For ordinary user lookups, nsswitch.conf is the king and usually files precedes sss.


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