Extend LDAP plugin to support AD authentication

[Tom Elliott]

I’ve added the suggested changes to the main ldap plugin. This is by no means ready to actually be used, @george1421 and I are going to be testing the crap out of this, but the progress is quite significant. Of course @Lee-Rowlett or anybody who is willing to give a test and feedback about failings and areas that may need improvement please run it and test it. It is currently under the working-RC-11 branch on GIT. I hope to have a completed, mostly working, ready for the RC-11 release.

[Tom Elliott]

Just for tracking purposes for those that would like to try this:

https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/tree/working-RC-11

Under packages/web/lib/plugins/ldap you will find the plugin.

Easiest way to get it would be to simply install the ldap plugin after installing working-RC-11 branch. I don’t recommend this only because while it’s a “WIP” and addresses bugs and minor improvements/fixes around what’s being found from RC-10, it’s also meaning those on RC-11 would be returning info that’s rather irrelevant for the time being. I’d prefer people to work on RC-10 and get a thorough list of bugs and issues to work out. That said, any of the developers and moderators that would like to install please do, I can fix the things I miss due to it not being in the “mainstream” of things which can help make RC-11 that much more suitable for environments.

This one exception (ldap) is the only thing I’d like to see people testing from RC-11 as it could use VAST amounts of improvements and make using FOG in an AD Environment that much easier to control.

For example, with the new modifications (once fully completed), you can define ldap authentication from eDirectory, openldap, ldap, and Active directory. You can associate groups in your ldap choice to allow users mobile access, and your IT team admin access. I hope something like SSO of this sort will make it into FOG 2.0 as well, which is why I’m kind of excited for this plugin to get revamped.

@Fernando-Gietz, @george1421, and myself have had the most authoring done for this plugin and have been added to the author’s of this plugin. @x23piracy You helped tremendously a few months ago with testing and providing an open test ring for me to use although it may not have accomplished what the two of us had hoped for.

Thank you @george1421 for actually kind of kickstarting this plugin back into shape. Thank you @Fernando-Gietz for actually establishing the basis of the plugin.

Anybody who would like to try this out so we can make it much better, please do and keep us posted. Please, for the time being, don’t post this into bugs though. I’m aware of the issues LDAP plugin currently has which is kind of why the work has been started to make it into a truly usable plugin.

[george1421]

I’m going to start a debugging session in a few minutes with this new ldap code. I would consider the current state as alpha code.

Todo items:

1. Review the code to ensure it still flows like I intended.
2. Load the modified code into my production environment and confirm it works as the proof of concept code does.
3. Work with changing case of groups, dn paths to make sure all case sensitivity is gone.
4. Clean up the web gui configuration page. Currently there are fields that don’t have any impact on the code (binddn, bindpass, searchscope). The elements were built in place in case we needed to create a more complex ldap auth.

This code does make a few assumptions about the target environment. I did use less complex logic to keep the lines of code down. It should work well for the different ldap backends. Only testing will tell.

[george1421]

Its been a few days since I posted an update to this. I’ve been debugging and have the ldap authentication working with AD. So the actual ldap authentication is working fine. I’ve run into a snag passing the authorized flag back to fog. I’m sure that can be worked out soon. Beyond that I’ve been testing with RC8 code. Once that is working I’ll stand up a new RC11 instance of FOG and confirm. In the end we are making progress with an end in sight.

[adukes40]

@george1421 Is this stricly to allow signing into the FOG Gui with AD credentials or will we be able to interact with AD via fog. Like assigning snapins to certain AD groups.

[george1421]

@adukes40 This is only for user login. So far I’ve only tested via the web gui.

[adukes40]

@george1421 would it be able to spawn from there? I have no idea how in depth it is. Im just generally curious.

[george1421]

@adukes40 While anything is possible it would be a lot of work, and it would then tie FOG to requiring an AD infrastructure.

I can say from a programming standpoint the code that FOG is built on can communicate with ldap pretty easily. So its possible to do. The issue is having enough motivation to pull it off. I looked at the ldap plugin that was in fog and have experience with programming queries to LDAP so there wasn’t a huge learning curve to update the plugin, plus what was there was sound already, they were just missing a few things.

[JJ Fullmer]

I did a little testing on this and wasn’t able to add a ldap server. Put in all the information and I just get “LDAP ID # is not valid” I got ID 1 and 2 as invalid with 2 attempts at adding a server. @Tom-Elliott said that you might want to know.

[george1421]

@JJ-Fullmer Wow interesting. I’ll surely take a look at that tonight. I installed RC11 B58 (I think) this AM after Tom updated the master code. The one thing that you must do if the LDAP plugin was installed before (now) is that you must uninstall and reinstall the plugin because the internal structure has changed. This AM after the refresh I had to recreate the ldap server and it installed correctly. Just to be sure uninstall the ldap plugin and then readd it back in.

As far as the status of the LDAP plugin, its (should be) almost complete. The only outstanding issue is adding the code for reauth. So as it stands right now once you are authorized via LDAP, you are authorized forever even if you kill the AD account (which is not to cool). I have a way to fix this tonight.

I’ll add a simple how to to this thread on what the plugin is expecting, but its pretty straight forward.

[george1421]

@JJ-Fullmer OK I couldn’t resist checking. I have B54 installed and I was able to add a second ldap server without issue. Let me refresh my install and see if something changed from B54

[george1421]

Progress is going very well with the ldap plugin. But we found that when we start bringing in other ldap serves to test, some of the shortcuts that worked for M$ did not work so well with other ldap servers. To that end, I wrote another proof of concept code using the long way to get a user’s ldap attributes. In this method I have to use an authorized read only user to query the ldap server to locate the user’s ldap account, then I use that ldap account to relogin to the ldap server to pick up the user’s group associations.

<?php

    // the user we are going to authenticate
    $user = 'user1234';
    $pass = 'Password';

    // IP address or fqdn of ldap server
    $server = '192.168.1.5';

    // credentials that have read access to the LDAP server
    $bindDN = 'cn=Bob Jones,ou=Users,ou=nyc,dc=domain,dc=com';
    $bindPass = 'Password.2';

    // How deep in ldap from search base are we going to look for the user
    $searchScope = 2;

        // clean up user name we only want the user's short name without any domain component
        // note I did not try to understand the regex expression but I expect there to be
        // issues with non-us english characters, just saying.
        $user = trim(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\_@\.]/', '', $user));

        // open connection to the server
        $ldapconn = ldap_connect($server,389);
        ldap_set_option($ldapconn, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3);
        ldap_set_option($ldapconn, LDAP_OPT_REFERRALS, 0);

        $accessLevel = 0;
        $userSearchDN = 'ou=nyc,dc=domain,dc=com';
        $adminGroup = 'FoG_Admins';
        $userGroup = 'FOG_Users';
        $grpMemberAttr = strtolower('memberOf');

        if ( ldap_bind($ldapconn, $bindDN, $bindPass) ) {
            // for the filter we are searching for a person with an NT style account like the contents of $user
            $filter = sprintf('(&(objectCategory=inetOrgPerson)(%s=%s))', 'sAMAccountName', $user);

            // we want to return the user's DN so that we can bind as the user
            // we will get his DN based on his samaccountname for AD
            $attr = array( 'dn' );

            switch ($searchScope) {
                case 1:
                    // LDAP_SCOPE_ONELEVEL search one level down but not base
                    $result = ldap_list($ldapconn, $userSearchDN, $filter, $attr);
                    break;
                case 2:
                    // LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE search base + all subtree (OUs) below
                    $result = ldap_search($ldapconn, $userSearchDN, $filter, $attr);
                    break;
                default:
                    // LDAP_SCOPE_BASE search base only and don't look any deeper
                    $result = ldap_read($ldapconn, $userSearchDN, $filter, $attr);
            }

            // count the number of entries returned
            $retcount = ldap_count_entries($ldapconn, $result);

            if ($retcount == 1) {
                // great we only returned one entry
                $entries = ldap_get_entries($ldapconn, $result);
                // pull out the user dn from the entries
                $userDN = $entries[0]['dn'];
            } else {
                $userDN = '';
            }

        }

        // if user dn is populated then attempt to connect (bind) to ldap as user
        if (!$userDN =='') {
            // Now rebind as the user we just found
            if ( ldap_bind($ldapconn, $userDN, $pass) ) {
                // If we get to here the user is authorized, now lets get the group membership

                // This time since we know the user DN (fully qualified ldap path) we can look up the user based on that
                // this filter just matches all objects (cheat)
                $filter = '(objectclass=*)';

                // get what groups this user is a member of
                $attr = array( $grpMemberAttr );
                
                // read in the attributes of this user
                $result = ldap_read($ldapconn, $userDN, $filter, $attr);


                // count the number of entries returned
                $retcount = ldap_count_entries($ldapconn, $result);

                if ($retcount > 0) {
                    $entries = ldap_get_entries($ldapconn, $result);

                    // check groups for membership
                    foreach($entries[0][$grpMemberAttr] as $grps) {
                        // is admin user, set level and break loop
                        if(strpos( $grps, $adminGroup )) { $accessLevel = 2; break; }

                       // is user, set level and keep looking just incase user is in both groups
                       if(strpos( $grps, $userGroup )) $accessLevel = 1;
                   }
                }

                // close our connection as bindDN
                ldap_unbind( $ldapconn );

                echo $accessLevel;

            } else {
                print 'unable to bind using user info, user is not authorized in ldap';

            }
     } else {
          echo 'User not found in LDAP';
     }
 ?>

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 Updated to latest rc11 and reinstalled the ldap plugin, great success.
I was able to add a server no problem.

Just a recommendation though, or maybe it’s a question. I figure the bindDN is the user you use to sign in to the domain and the same with the password. Perhaps it’s possible to utilize the same method or maybe even link to the existing one that fog uses for joining to the domain?
Just cause it’s gonna be prone to error and confusion if to set up a binding user you have to put in that full ldap style query with the cn’s and the ou’s, and the dc’s and what have you. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding that field.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 Also, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place for the documentation, so feel free to direct me to where this may already be written. But what do I do after I set up a server? Are users going to just populate automatically or is there another step? I feel like I’m missing something.

[george1421]

@JJ-Fullmer I’m not sure I fully understand your question.

In rc11 it may or may not show the bind dn just yet. That code is in a state of flux a bit.

But in general we will switch over to using a bind DN (which needs to be in full ldap format) to initially connect to the ldap server to look up the user’s cn (in full ldap format). We were using just the short form of the user’s credentials (user@domain.com) to bind to ldap, but that only appears to work reliably with AD.

Tom and (or at least I) will have another coding session tonight to see if we can get this wrapped up. All of the parts work independently now we just need to get them to work together.

[george1421]

@JJ-Fullmer The documentation hasn’t been written just yet because our approach changed overnight. Let me refresh my server and I’ll post something here to get you started. I can’t guarantee it works until I update my server and test it.

[george1421]

Here is a screen shot of what is expected.

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 I’d go further by limiting the bind DN account to only the OUs where the fog users and fog groups will be.

[Tom Elliott]

I don’t know how well it will work, but my testing of the most current ldap stuff appears to be working pretty well.

At least when done against the ldap server from forumsys.

Here’s my “configuration” that seems to work.

I don’t know all the other potentials but at least others can see the “POC” in action.

With any luck, others can see the “potential” and perform some more testing within their own environments.

It follows, more or less, in line with what @george1421 has done, but with a few caveat’s to what was required to get it working for the ldap I was testing against.

Hopefully it will work for AD environments just as easily as it will for what I’ve tested already.

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman BindDN can be anything really. This is totally up to the administrator, and it typically requires a password. This is simply so the server can find data and ensure all is fine.

Once the bind is validated and finds the user, the bind is handed over to the user who’s actually trying to login. From there we find the associated elements for that user and validate the area (or not) they are to be a part of.