CAS Server 3.4.10 on tomcat.. where is user information - authentication

I am trying to learn CAS and I have the cas-server-3.4.10 running in tomcat6 by just moving the war into the webapp.. I am following the install.txt which show me to use NetID for the user name and password and it works but where is the user information?

If you are just using the standard WAR file without making any changes, the default authentication handlers works such that the userId must be the same as the password you put in, so that you can login. This is just a sample and should never really be used in production.
Your user credential store is usually maintained elsewhere, typically inside an LDAP or ActiveDirectory instance. You'll then need to configure the config file with the right authentication handler that received the connection info to that instance and validates user accounts.
CAS is not responsible for user account management, etc. It works with existing solutions that provide a remedy for that need.

Related

Using Flask Login with LDAP safe and secure

I am creating a login page with an authentication using LDAP. I could see LDAP3 packages for flask with login forms as well. I am looking for a form where the developer of the portal(say me or anyone in our team) should not be able to add any print statements and sniff the username and password when someone log in...
The flask form is exposing the password variable as a plain string. Even if it doesn't expose , it is possible to put a print statement in the flask_form validate function.
Is there any option available like the form is bundled as binary or c-python module where the developer has no option to sniff the credentials at all..
If not possible or no options available as they know off, any other framework like django helps for these usecase?
By design, server-side LDAP authentication requires the server receive the username & password from the user and relay that information to the LDAP server. This means a developer could insert a line that logs all credentials out somewhere, grab the passwords from process traces, dump memory, etc. If you don't want any of the developers or system administrators to have access to user passwords, use some type of federated authentication instead of LDAP.
In a federated authentication scheme, the user auths against some other source (e.g. ADFS) and your app checks a token that essentially says "this trusted other auth source says the person is Lisa".

How to configure LDAP authentication module instance in OpenAM

I am trying to protect a Java servlet with OpenAM + J2EE tomcat agent. I got this part working by using embedded OpenDJ of OpenAM.
Now I am trying to authenticate against a LDAP server, so I added a LDAP module instance for OpenAM, but I get "User has no profile in this organization" when I am trying use uid/password of an user from that LDAP store.
I checked OpenAM administration guide on this the description is rather brief. I am wondering if it is even possible to do this without using the data store configured for OpenAM?
The login process in OpenAM is made of two stages:
Verifying credentials based on the authentication chain and individual authentication module configurations
User profile lookup
By configuring the LDAP authentication module you took care of the authentication part, however the profile lookup fails as you haven't configured the user data store (see data stores tab). Having a configured data store allows you to potentially expose additional user details across your deployment (e.g. include user attributes in SAML assertions or map them to HTTP headers with the agent), so in most of the scenarios having a data store configured is necessary.
In case you still don't want to configure a data store, then you can prevent the user profile lookup failure by going to Access Control -> <realm> -> Authentication -> All Core Settings -> User Profile Mode and set it to Ignore.
This is unrelated to authentication but it's related to authorization ... you have to configure appropriate policies ... see OpenAM docs.
Agents will enforce authorization, OpenAM determines if the user has the permission to access a protected resource.
As Bernhard has indicated authentication is only part of the process of granting access to a user. He is referring to using a Policy to control access.
Another method is to check if the authenticated user is a member of the desired group programmatically. This can be useful when you want access control over resources that OpenAM doesn't know about (e.g. specific data).
For example, lets say that you want different groups to have access to different rows in a table in a database. You can retrieve the group information associated with the user and add that to your database query, thus restricting the data returned.
I'm sure that you could do this with OpenAM as well using custom modules to allow the policy to use information in the database as resource, but I've found it is much simpler to perform this fine grained access control in your code, and is in all likelihood significantly faster.

access restrict to authenticated users only

We are developing a self registration app.
Our app allows users to register for web apps and is deployed on a weblogic 10.3.5 app server. The weblogic is connected to a local ldap system.
Once the user registeres with our app we call corporate servces to generate a user id. password activation, authentication is all handled by the corporate servcies. which also has a corporate ldap that contains all users in the company.
The approach works fine for 'new users' ie users that are not present in the corporate ldap or the local ldap: users enter their details and are issued a user id which we then copy into the local ldap once the user activates their account.
The use case we're grappling with at the moment is how to handle 'existing' users that wish to register. These are users that are currently in the corporate ldap and wish to 'register' with our applications. They get rejected during the normal registration process as they already exist in the coroporate ldap.
What i'd like to do is force them to login (simply so they don't register on behalf of somone else) and once they're logged in simply copy their data into the local ldap.
The problem is even if they are successfully authenticated by the corporate service, they don't (yet exist) as far as the weblogic server is concerned. is there a way to obtain the user id that comes with the authentication token ?
The authentication method is SAML 1.1
The application is a standard Java EE servlet based webapp using the struts2 framework.
Any ideas would be much appreciated.
Within WebLogic, you can define multiple authentication providers and set them up in the order you would like the system to use. Since you are copying data over, you would have to programmatically check for the existence of the account before attempting to create it on the LDAP server.
It would be a lot simpler if you use the external LDAP server directly instead of copying the data to the internal LDAP server, letting you attempt logging the user in and creating the account only while catching the appropriate exception.

Accessing active directory from wpf application without having to request / resend credentials

I am writing a WPF application, and one feature I want to implement is the ability to display a list of computers in the domain. I have found some useful Active Directory code here:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/90142/Everything-in-Active-Directory-via-Csharp-NET-3-5-.aspx
Typically code examples dealing with AD seem to require the user's credentials to make requests. But it occurs to me that if you are running the application from a computer that is part of the domain, the user has already provided user credentials sufficient to access AD on that domain controller, when logging on to the system.
Is there some way that the user can access AD via my application without the app having to ask the user to reenter the same credentials again? I mean is there some kind of token that I can forward that indicates the user is already authenticated? I am concerned about the risks of having to store and transmit credentials securely when I don't have to.
Thanks for any advice.
I later discovered that if you are logged on to the domain, that is sufficient for you to access the active directory store, without having to supply further credentials or impersonate an admin. And in some cases you can also access it without being logged in at all.

Best practices for a Password Management System

I'm working on a password management system which stores the passwords of a bunch of services (gmail, bank of america account, youtube etc). The user will be able to launch each of these services by logging into my application. The application will then POST the username and password associated with that service to that service's login url in a new tab and you will be immediately logged in. My question is, this method exposes the actual password of the user to the client side (since I'm creating a form with username and password, in plain text, as hidden fields and calling form.submit). I'm wondering is there any other method by which this can be achieved? How do all the password management sites work? Your help is appreciated.
Do it server side, what else can I say? Anyway, I can only see this as a learning experience, not something that would eventually go into production. cUrl could be a good start. Why do you use form.submit anyway?
This is called "formfill" in terms of access management terminology, if you are thinking about access gateway (http). If you are thinking about browser plugin, have a look at the firefox autofill plugin. And which finally reduces to single sign-on.
Single sign-on are done different ways,-
some servers uses active directory to store all the passwords and later access using the master password , i.e. the active directory password of that user to access his credentials.
Some uses SAML
Some uses e-directory
Whatever you use, if it is server-side application (e.g. Appache supports formfill), it parses all the forms based on form name or resource path and fills credentials based on the authenticated session from the user.