LDAP support for different password hashes

[Graham Allan]

I'm wondering if ldapcd on Tru64 5.1B (we run PK6) has any support for password hashes other than crypt. It's a minor irritation to us that we have to keep all our passwords in crypt format rather than something slightly more secure...

(I know we can use different hashes when running enhanced security, but here I am just talking about basic security with an ldap accounts backend - we need compatibility with other OSes).

I haven't seen anything documented, but running "strings" against /usr/sbin/ldapcd does bring up an occurrence of "{SHA}". Does this imply it might work? My casual attempt to have it work, didn't. But someone here is certain to know more!

Thanks for any feedback,

Graham

[Ann Majeske · Accepted solution]

Looking at the source code, there is a check if the encrypted password length is 28 characters the ldap SIA mechanism assumes that the password is encrypted using SHA with base64 encoding. But, I'm pretty sure this is in a section of code that is not used. I don't see a way for creating the SHA encrypted passwords in the ldap mechanism, either. So it's probably just a leftover reference from a possible feature that was never developed. I could find no references in the documentation that this feature is allowed either.

Ann

[Graham Allan]

Thanks for checking the source code for me! It's too bad that the code is "almost there" but can't be used, but I guess this is something very unlikely to get changed at this point in time, since it has never been advertised as working. I guess we could check into using SHA only for users who don't need to access Tru64...

Getting the hashes into LDAP wouldn't be much of a problem since we tend to use external tools to manage the directory (in our case https://gna.org/projects/smbldap-tools/)