I have a strange problem with an authentication of users in Grails using Spring Security plugin:
When the user logs into his account, he sees credentials of completely different user (I print out the credentials)
Sometimes the credentials switch to other user when user is already correctly authenticated.
This problem does occur neither on my development machine nor on a test serwer.
The evironment where problem is present:
Students in a school are testing the system on school's computers
Each student registers as a new user
School's computers has some security restrictions (that I don't know)
All computers has one IP assigned (I don't know how internal network is configured yet)
Firstly, I thought it had something to do with cookie storage (j_session_id), but students could log in to Facebook or Gmail, etc. without any unexpected account switches.
It looks as if all cookies on all computers are being overriden when new user logs in - this was my guess but I can't confirm that all consequent users have the same - last logged user's credentials.
Sadly, I can't debug it at school's place, because it's far away.
How can I find out what is going on?
What might be the possible cause of the problem?
Why have users often different credentials when they are logging in?
Related
I try to give new users in our domain access to our VSTS. We have MSDN enterprise subscriptions via MPN. The subscription is assigned and visible for the user if he logs in my.visualstudio.com with his work account. If the user tries to access the VSTS at [ourprojects].visualstudio.com he gets “VSTS login fails with 401 not authorized – [user] has multiple accounts associated with it. Your work or school account does not have access to [ourprojects].visualstudio.com, but your personal account does have access. “.
Signing in with the personal account as suggested by the error message leads to another error: “This Microsoft account does not exist.” This is correct. The account in charge is definitely a work account in Microsoft Azure Active Directory. So the first error message is somehow strange and leads into the wrong direction.
Our domain accounts are synchronized with Azure Active Directory (AAD). I can see the new users both in our domain and AAD. The user can login into my.visualstudio.com with his work account. So sync with Windows Server AD and AAD looks working correctly. MSDN assignment works, too.
Loggin into my.visualstudio.com redirects to the login page of our domain. thsi is corect and works fine. But this redirect does not take place loggin into VSTS.
For other older accounts in our domain VSTS access with work account works completely fine. Has anybody experienced similar problems?
Finally I talked to Microsoft support. It turned out that this VSTS account is not backed by Azure Active Directory. It has to be converted to do so.
To check if a Azure DevOps/VSTS account is backed by AAD, you can look in the settings page ("gears"->Settings) of Azure DevOps at the very bottom.
i have a scenario running with an own CALDAV-server and CALDAV-clients like (iOS-calendar, mac-Calendar, Android sync adapter, Thunderbird/Lightning, Outlook Sync, ...)
The authentication so far works via basic auth (https and the "Authentication"-Header).
The CALDAV-clients store the user/password in their configuration.
So far so good, but the issue comes now once the password of the user/account either gets changed, reset, expired, etc.
The server has a restrictive password policy enforced, which locks the account after x failed attempts (e.g. 10).
What is happening now obviously is, that once the CALDAV-client configuration was not updated it continues to use an old password.
The server responds with an 401 not authorized - ok, thats fine apparently again.
But the Clients still continue to use the outdated password. It would be nicer to stop polling and present the user with a dialog that his credentials are not valid anymore. But the clients are out of my control so nothing can be directly done here.
The result: after 2-3 iterations (as most clients tries multiple request in one sync iteration) the account on the server of the user is locked due to too many failed login attempts.
That is not nice. The issue seems to be generic and known as "stale passwords".
A solution could only be a better client handling (out of scope here) or a oAuth-token handling. But i was not able to find anything that standard CALDAV-clients supports this. Only google calendar seems to enforce an oAuth2 authorization before allowing CALDAV communication.
So the question is, is there a good way to improve the bad experience of locked accounts?
Some special 401 response which tells the clients to forget the password or not using it again?
constructive feedback highly welcome.
Edit:
for macOS and ios calendar i found a strange behavior (bug) causing and/or enforcing the described situation.
A standard 401 response will cause the clients to bring up the password dialog as expected and described above. The clients stop polling until a new password is entered - as desired.
In my case the 401 response body contained an inline base 64 image (img src="data..."):
This doesnt lead to a password renewal dialog! Just a "something goes wrong" error state.
The clients are continuing to poll! Locking the accounts after some tries ;(
A solution for this problem than will be to remove the inline image but for me it sounds like a bug that an inline image in the 401 response provokes a different behavior on the client.
Some special 401 response which tells the clients to forget the password or not using it again?
Well, 401 is that response. If the client receives a 401 it knows the the login/password combination it provided doesn't work anymore, and shouldn't retry with the same. Obviously the clients don't do this, partially because:
On the other side your servers x-failed-attempts locking doesn't work with stateless protocols for obvious reasons. HTTP doesn't have that feature builtin. Locking the account is a side effect a client doesn't have to expect when running idempotent HTTP requests.
Assume the client is downloading 10 batches of items concurrently. If the credentials invalidate during this, the account would immediately be locked :-)
Summary: You can't use basic auth naively with backends that lock accounts after n-tries.
Google and iCloud both use token based auth schemes (Google OAuth, iCloud a proprietary one). You can't expect those to work in other clients. E.g. while the Apple clients support OAuth for Google, I don't think they support that for other account types.
So what can you do
I'm reading your question so that you own the account server and that the account locking is intentional and desired. (I.e. it is not a side effect of a different (e.g. SSO) backend system you reach out to.)
I think in this case it should be reasonable to rework your account system to allow unlimited login attempts with just the old password.
The lock-after-n-attempts measure is to protect against people trying different passwords. In your case it is always the same and as a bonus it also matches the old password.
There are a lot of different variations of this approach.
We are trying to build OAuth2 Authorization with IdentityServer3.
So we downloaded the Bytes from nuget and connected it with our database.
The database was initialized with the default scopes and the sample clients from Thinktecture self.
Then we connected AD FS as IDP via OWIN and made an simple ExternalUserService.
So far everything worked fine and the permissions page of the IdSrv could be opened, showing the username and that no application has consent up to now.
Then we tried to connect Xamarin.Auth to that and got an error Cannot determine application to sign in to and in the logs an error Signin Id not present (after logon at the ADFS IDP).
To reduce complexity, we decided to go back to the InMemoryUserService and created one InMemoryUser. This worked for the permissions page (at least for a short period of time - time is over now), but it did not allow OAuth2 Authorization Code Flow, which ended up in showing the login page again and again and again. And there is no evidence of any error in the logs.
How can we debug, what is happening? Is there any way to see, why a user gets redirected to the login page again despite being logged in?
--
We reduced the complexity even further by creating a new empty MVC application, which just uses a simple InMemoryUserFactory.
Now it's getting a little bit confusing: one user was able to logon from his machine - other machines (same user - since we created only one) are not able to login and get prompted with the login over and over again.
If using IdentityServer3 and you use own external login methods you should really pay close attention to the API of the IdSrv3.
We tried to create a login resutl with just the subject - this is made for local login on the server. If this is switched off at the same time, you will end up having problems.
So if you use an own external login provider and switch off local login, make sure to call the right overload for the authenticate method (3 Parameters in our case).
I want to build a small application similar to Run As (Windows native) and DropMyRights.
A simple form with a text box which will hold the path to the program that i want to run, and a dropdown to select the account to impersonate (<system>, <interactive>, or "user NameLastname") when starting the child process.
Just in case this is not enough reason to point me to the right direction, here goes the answer to "why would you want to do that?"
I noticed that some of my applications, like Google Calendar Sync, Google Drive Sync and Chrome autoupdater (not chrome.exe), when run as <system> can't pass through the proxy (ISA/TMG).
I do not have access to the server config settings, so i have to do this client-side.
The goal is to have the child process running as <interactive>, and use the NTLM token.
How can i pass CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials or CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials to the process?
I can't pass username/password/domain because we authenticate on the domain using smartcard logon.
That means i don't even know my Active Directory password.
Answering questions:
It isn't clear what you mean by <system> and <interactive>. Please be
more specific. Do you mean you want to launch processes in your logon
session but have them run as SYSTEM? – Harry Johnston
By interactive i mean the logged on user credentials. Could be local, but in my case i need the domain credentials.
To be even more specific, i want to use the token already generated by the proxy.
I do not want to launch processes as system.
I want system processes to connect to the internet using my (already provided and approved by ISA/TMG) credentials.
More info about this here: What is Interactive Logon?
Hmmm. The Chrome updater isn't a normal application, it's a system
service. Are you trying to run system services in the logged on user's
context? – Harry Johnston
That's right. Exactly what i want to do.
But, Google Updater does not appear on the services list.
It's a scheduled task.
And changing the task to be executed with my credentials doesn't work. Still can not bypass the proxy.
We have our own web server hosting our website that is open to the public outside of our network.
I have a request to make our "Internal Postings" link on our Careers page to authenticate the user against our network's Active Directory list.
I currently have it setup so the link hits a page inside the directory structure of the website, and this page's folder is set to "Integrated Windows Authentication". Anonymous access is turned off for this page. If the user is authenticated (ie: logged into our network or supplies proper credentials) it passes them on to an external careers website which hosts our job postings. If they fail to authenticate, it displays a custom 401 error page.
This works fine, but there is a problem with it. Using IE, people cannot just enter their username. They (of course) are required to enter the domain name as well. Unfortunately the default 'domain' is set to the URL of our website (www.xyz.com/username). I would like it to automatically choose the name of our internal domain (aaa/username) but am unsure of how to do this.
Another option would be to use LDAP and a little ASP scripting to authenticate the user. I have this code already, but am unsure of the security consequences of doing so. Basically, the page will be setup for anonymous authentication, and if the user isn't logged into our network, they will be prompted for a username/password using standard textboxes. This is then passed to an ASP script that does an LDAP lookup against our Active Directory. Is there any security issues with this method?
Which method would you choose to do?
Thanks.
EDIT: It seems I cannot authenticate to ActiveD via LDAP using a username/password combo. So forget about that option.
My question now is, how can I change the default 'domain' that IWA uses? Is that at all possible? IE seems to default to 'www.xyz.com\username' (my website) rather than 'aaa\username' (my domain name). Of course, www.xyz.com\username fails because that is not where our ActiveD resides... Is this possible? I want to make it as simple as possible for our employees.
You cannot authenticate an user with a script that looks up the user in LDAP. You need to know that the user is who it claims it is, and the only way to do that is to let NTLM/Kerberos authenticate the user (ie. establish proof that the user knows a secret stored in the AD, the password).
The URL of the web site to the set of sites considered be in the local intranet zone for IE browsers running on the internal network. By default sites consider to local intranet will be sent the current logged on users credentials when challanged with NTLM/Kerberos. Hence your internal users shouldn't even see a network logon box.
I hate to dredge up an old thread, but the answers are a bit misleading, if I understand the question. The thread Remus refers to is about authenticating via LDAP with a username only. As he points out, that isn't possible. But it looks like what Kolten has in mind is authenticating via LDAP with a username and password both. That's a standard practice called binding.