I have an application that needs to sync periodically to my directory service (OpenLDAP or AD).
To do so, it is necessary to bind an admin account with a DN and password, to access users on LDAP.
As far as I understand, there is the possibility of using anonymous, however for security reasons, its use is not recommended.
Since this periodic synchronization is done automatically by a routine (hourly), I need to store in addition to the account DN, also admin password in the application database.
However, passwords are usually sent to be authenticated in plaintext against
directory service (within a secure SSL / TLS connection) and the directory service itself that finds its password stored in plaintext or some hash (md5, sha-1, etc.)
How to ensure the security of admin password stored in database for synchronization with LDAP? Or, is there a best practice to implement a sync periodic using LDAP?
Applications examples that require password (admin) to read LDAP.
Moodle
(https://docs.moodle.org/37/en/LDAP_authentication#Bind_settings)
Sugar CRM (https://support.sugarcrm.com/Knowledge_Base/Password_Management/Configuring_LDAP_Authentication_Using_Active_Directory/#Prerequisites)
But it does not clear how the password is stored.
It's true that anonymous bind is disabled by default in Active Directory. However, if you are just reading, you don't need an "admin" account. You need any account. The account does not need to have any special permissions. You just need something that can authenticate to the domain.
But if you're going to be authenticating users, then you will need to get the user's password, and you can just use the user's credentials to read from LDAP. That would be true for both AD and OpenLDAP.
Related
LDAP/AD Experts,
It might be simple for you but its challenging task for me!.
"ldap queries - need the dn of the users who are authenticated via ldap protocol and their IP address"
We are migrating authentication out of AD/LDAP.
We’re looking to migrate applications that are directly using AD for employees.
Its not specific to OU and Group but overall active directory.
We have plenty of applications which uses AD/LDAP for authentication.
How do I pull such data? At least need to have user details.
Getting the DN of a user is easy with any ldapsearch utility.
There is no method to obtain "the users who are authenticated" from LDAP. You could find the "time" a user did last Authenticate, regardless of how, from the lastLogon or LastLogonTimeStamp.
Generally, the IP Address of the user is not available as part of the user entry within Microsoft Active Directory.
You might be able to obtain this from some power-shell script, but I was unable to find anything from a quick search.
We have a C# web app for new customer intake, at the end of which the user enters a password value we apply to their new Active Directory user object when we invoke the userPrincipal .NET method to create their user object. Our code also creates an account in our Azure AD tenant, with the correct values (ImmutableID) set for Azure AD Connect to import and join both accounts on its next pass (30 minutes AADC cycle wait time not acceptable for our requirements). We sync our password hashes from on-premise AD to Azure AD, and we have password complexity enabled in AD, and we enabled and added our own vocabulary to the Banned Words (substrings) facility in Azure AD. We are considering installing the MS "Password Protection" service on our DC's that will also apply Azure Banned Words checking when passwords are updated on-premise.
To keep this question short, we really would like to pre-validate the user entered passwords against all the password policies, including the banned words list (assume we install that service on all our on-prem DCs), but we can't find a method or service in .NET that will pre-validate that a proposed password passes all the active password policies. Our users tend to use Azure Self Service Password Reset, on-premise password changes later on are rare. But in the C# programming, it appears you have to actually request an Add of a new AD username to get .NET to evaluate the password value and signal status back, from the userPrincipal method in .NET
Anyone got any tricky ideas how to get a password pre-validated against AD password policies without the context of adding an actual new user, but assuming that the sAMAccountName that will be submitted does NOT yet exist in Active Directory? We thought about creating a temporary AD user with hash or base64 of a GUID for a unique temporary usernames, get any password evaluation feedback back from .NET, then delete the temporary user object, but that's a lot of overhead just to check a password, would trigger replications and generate beaucoup EventViewer and AD-AuditPlus log events, much junk network traffic. Thank you.
I understand that the principle of Kerberos is to allow authentication between users and services on an unsecured network. Tickets generated by the authentication and ticket-granting service support secure communications and don't require a password to be transmitted across the network.
The flow relies on the auth server in the KDC (s) having a shared secret with the client (c).
However, at some point, the user itself must have been created and generally, users are created from client machines (you don't usually log onto the domain controller to create users)
So how do the user and secret key (Kac) get created in the first place and stored in the KDC database if the password/secret is never sent across the network?
The administration of principals in a KDC's database is outside the scope of the normal Kerberos protocol. Usually it's done using some auxiliary protocol, and each KDC can implement it in any way it wants.
For example, MIT Kerberos has the (SunRPC-based) kadmin protocol, and the kadmin client indeed sends the actual administrator-specified password to the kadmind service running on the KDC. (The RPC message is encrypted using the Kerberos session key, of course.) Heimdal has its own kadmin protocol, mostly incompatible with MIT's but working the same way.
(Both also have "local" versions of the kadmin tool, which directly accesses the KDC database backend – this is how the initial admin accounts are created, typically by running kadmin.local on the server console or through SSH.)
Microsoft Active Directory has several user administration protocols, some of them dating to pre-AD days, but the primary mechanism is LDAP (usually over an GSSAPI/Kerberos-encrypted session, but occassionally TLS-encrypted).
To create a new account in MS AD, the administrator creates an LDAP 'User' or 'Computer' entry with the plain-text 'userPassword' attribute, and the domain controller automatically transforms this attribute into Kerberos keys (instead of storing it raw). The commonly used "AD Users & Computers" applet (dsa.msc) is really an interface to the LDAP directory.
All of the above implementations also support a second administration protocol, the kpasswd protocol whose sole purpose is to allow an existing user to change their password. As you'd expect, it also works by transmitting the user's new password over the network, again making use of Kerberos authentication and encryption. (Password changes can also be done via AD's LDAP or MIT/Heimdal's kadmin, but kpasswd has the advantage of being supported by all three.)
As a final side note, the PKINIT extension uses X.509 certificates to authenticate the AS-REQ – in which case the client doesn't know their own shared secret, so the KDC in fact sends the whole Kc to the client over the network (encrypted using a session key negotiated via DH, somewhat like TLS would). This is mostly used in Active Directory environments with "smart card" authentication.
lets say I have two on-premise domains (DomainA.org, domainB.org) and one tenant (domainA.onmicrosoft.com). Both domains are sync thanks to Azure AD Connect, so user from domainA can log to office.com, there is no problem. Hoever user from domainB getting this "Error validating credentials due to invalid username or password.", and when I changed password from portal.office.com for this user from domainB. I can log with this new password, but only to office365 services, its not sync to On-prem.
And another wierd thing is, that I cant change password for users from domainA.
Do You know where the problem is?
Thanks
I understand you have synced your 2 domains to Azure AD through Azure AD connect . Initially you have registered both the domain in Azure AD and verified both. Kindly check what kind of authentication you were using for Domain A since you were not able to change the password from Azure End. If you have federated that domain it is not possible to change from the cloud. If you were using password hash synchronization then the authentication will happen if cloud and you can change for managed domain.
I request you to go through this article about password writeback . When you are getting an error message while logging before resetting the password kindly note the correlation ID and time stamp and need to get a support ticket since it will be due to multiple reasons.
I'm thinking of using application roles in SQL Server I've read the following on the Microsoft MSDN site:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190998.aspx
Connecting with an Application Role
The following steps make up the process by which an application role switches security contexts:
A user executes a client application.
The client application connects to an instance of SQL Server as the user.
The application then executes the sp_setapprole stored procedure with a password known only to the application.
If the application role name and password are valid, the application role is enabled.
At this point the connection loses the permissions of the user and assumes the permissions of the application role.
I'm wondering, if the application must know the password, how best to achieve this. I would assume storing the password in source code is a security risk. Is there another secure way to deploy the password with the application (note this is a windows client application that will be deployed to user machines).
There is actually another way to deploy the password with the application.
You can store the password as a secret in the database itself.
For instance, use a stored procedure or a scalar function which returns this "secret". This is an additional step in the logic you describe, to be executed just after the connection is made by the application with the user credentials.
This is possible because the users will have access to the database using Windows Authentication anyway.
The permissions need to be setup so that users are granted access to connect to the database and to the programmable object only.
To "obfuscate" (NOT secure) the password, you can store an encrypted version in the database and use a simple encryption / decryption (like this one).
This approach has the following advantages:
The password is not stored in clear text anywhere (please note though that it will travel in clear text on the network if you do not use SSL Encryption)
Users of the application are not required to provide any input
The application source code does not include the password
The application deployment does not include the password
The password can be reset very easily, for instance on a schedule
There is no way to deploy a password on a user workstation w/o a local administrator being able to discover it. You can only raise the bar so high, but if the price is worth it they will find it.
You should rely on the user providing the password, which ultimately boils down to using Windows authentication instead, if possible. You should always assume that whatever privileges the application has, the user has them as well and he/she can exercise them using an alternative access API (ie. any query tool). If you cannot trust the user with certain privileges, then you must not deploy the application on his/her computer. For example use a multi-tier solution that isolates the database from the user and add any necessary validation in this intermediate tier (most ASP.Net and/or WCF apps would qualify as such multi-tier when done properly).