login_ldap security announcement

From: Peter Werner (peterwat_private)
Date: Thu Feb 20 2003 - 14:09:36 PST

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    Sebastian Stark from Directory Applications for Advanced Security and 
    Information Management (http://www.daasi.de) has found a serious issue 
    with login_ldap, affecting all versions. login_ldap is a BSD 
    Authentication module for authenticating users off an LDAP server, and 
    runs on OpenBSD and BSD/OS. It is third party software, and is not 
    part of OpenBSD or BSD/OS.
    
    From http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin/security.html
    
    "An unauthenticated bind results in an anonymous authorization. 
    Unauthenticated bind mechanism is disabled by default, but can 
    be enabled by specifying "allow bind_anon_cred" in slapd.conf(5). 
    As a number of LDAP applications mistakenly generate 
    unauthenticated bind request when authenticated access was 
    intended (that is, they do not ensure a password was provided), 
    this mechanism should generally not be enabled."
    
    In OpenLDAP 2.0.x, the following operations lead to an anonymous bind
    by default:
    
     - BIND with DN set but no password provided (bind_anon_dn)
     - BIND with no DN but a password was provided (bind_anon_cred)
     - BIND with no DN and no password (bind_anon)
    
    You can disable any of those BIND methods by putting 'disallow
    <feature>' into your slapd.conf where <feature> stands for the
    corresponding keyword given in parentheses above.
    
    In OpenLDAP 2.1.x all but bind_anon are disabled by default. For an
    authentication service this is probably what most people want.
    
    login_ldap has been updated to check that a password has been provided.
    
    It is available here: http://www.ifost.org.au/~peterw/login_ldap-3.3.tar.gz
    MD5 (login_ldap-3.3.tar.gz) = 52e905d54a136c3d850158f4f7548a3f
    
    The other main change is it no longer installed setuid root, please see the
    README included for more information.
    
    I would encourage other people writing LDAP applications to check their 
    software for this issue. Many thanks to Sebastian for his help with this
    issue, work on a suitable fix and this advisory.
    
    Peter Werner
    Feb 21, 2003
    --
    IFOST: http://www.ifost.org.au
    



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