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Re: ppolicy by group

Buchan Milne wrote:
On Thursday 26 June 2008 12:32:04 Michael Ströder wrote: 
Bear in mind that in a single password environmemt proxy authentication
(like with Squid) is somewhat a security risk anyway since the password
is transferred in clear over the wire to the proxy for each HTTP hit
going through the proxy.

Unfortunately, however, it does not seem that there is any secure proxy authentication scheme for an entirely Unix environment (Mozilla on Unix as the client, Squid on Unix as the proxy server), even with Kerberos infrastructure in place.

Hmm, Mozilla has NTLM support. I'm using it with SPNEGO/Kerberos (together with CAS). Not sure whether that would work with Proxy-Authorize either.

I have also started discussions with some web application frameworks
(e.g. Catalyst).

I'd rather recommend to use a decent WebSSO system and integrate web
servers/applications with that central authentication component because
when using centralized passwords you don't want to transmit the password
to every integrated system. Rather in a SSO system system see only
short-time tickets. I'm successfully using CAS for that in one customer
project. It works pretty well and the developers are very responsive.

Indeed, but if you have existing applications on an existing framework that has LDAP support (we use SSL end-to-end), then it should have support for expiring passwords.

But it may be less overall work to add support for expiring passwords to one central authc instance and integrate systems with that. Because you always have to redirect the user to a password change form. Implementing this interaction is the problem for most systems. Look at Apache's mod_auth_ldap which does not provide a interactive UI at all. It simply cannot provide the user interaction needed.

Migrating to an SSO system would be an option, but I have many more features which have higher priority ... 

Your mileage may vary...

In this specific case, there are also advantages to the application having access to the clear-text password (as it can then be used with the logged-in users credentials to perform operations on other devices which authenticate against the same system, but have no SSO support). 

Yes, web2ldap is working like that.

Either people should stop shipping web server authentication modules for LDAP, or they should have password policy support.

Let's look at a very simply case: How should a web server which implements HTTP basic authc implement the user interaction needed? It simply relies on the browser popping up the login window, nothing else. What you could do is redirect the user to an error page implemented as CGI-BIN which makes further checks. You can do that yourself.

Ciao, Michael.