LDAP: Authenticated Searches without a manager password #162
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Allow to use the LDAP AuthProvider with a LDAP Server prohibiting anonymous searches but without providing a manager password : searches are made on behalf of the authenticated user.
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I have manually merged this. Thanks! |
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I need to ask: what problem does this change try to solve? Since Gitblit will always bind as the manager first, a manager password will always have to be provided. What is the intented benefit of searching for the user account as the user instead of the manager? That should render the manager account obsolete, but the commit doesn't actually do that. |
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When this patch was proposed, the manager password was not mandatory. you can provide an empty user/password. I don't know however if something has changed since v1.6 This patch allow to use an ldap server without the manager password, when the server doesn't allow anonymous search : it binds as the user. I use it every day with my gitblit instance with a corporate active directory. |
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So you use this with an empty username and password or just an empty password? Does your manager account exist and have an empty password? I haven't understood yet how this works. In your version, too, |
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Let me ask differently: Do you expect that, with this change, when the |
…cenarios. Gitblit allows in its configuration to set a "manager" user (and password) which can be used to search for the entry of a user wanting to log in. If they are both not set, an anonymous search is attempted. In the description below, when I say "...as manager", it is either as manager or anonymous. So far the behaviour of Gitblit, with respect to binding to and searching in LDAP, has been the following when a user logs in: **bind as manager** **search for the user** _bind as the user_ _search for the teams_ I'll call this code flow A. Later an additional configuration option had been added: `realm.ldap.bindpattern`. (PR gitblit-org#162) It was meant to allow for not using a manager nor anonymous binds, by searching the directory as the user logging in. This is done in code flow B: **bind as manager** _bind as user_ _search for user_ _search for teams_ Both A and B are flawed, I think. In A, it looks like a mistake to me that the binding stays with the user after authentication. The problem that this causes is, that in LDAP server configurations where normal users are not allowed to read groups, the team information cannot be retrieved. I tried but failed to understand how B is supposed to work. There will always be a bind request as either anonymous or the manager DN when the LDAP connection is created. If neither is possible, the authentication process will fail and the user cannot log in. When synchronizing users and teams from LDAP, the following code flow is exercised: F: **bind as manager** **search for users** **search for teams** This patch fixes both code flows by introducing a new flow. C: **bind as manager** **search for user** _bind as user to authenticate_ **bind as manager** **search for teams** And it changes code flow B to the following code flow D: _bind as user_ _search for user_ _search for teams_ With code flows A, C, D and F the following usage (and authentication) scenarios are covered. They are described from the view of a Gitblit administrator's intent and his LDAP setup. * Users and team should be snychronized with LDAP This means anonymous or a fixed account must be able to read users and groups. => covered by C and F As the above allows for authentication and is required for synchronisation, all the others below do not cover synchronization. * No anonymous binding allowed and no special manager binding required This means that users must be able to read user an group entries. => covered by D * The user DN needs to be searched, e.g. because they are not all under the same parent DN. This means that anonymous or a fixed account must be able to read users. -- anonymous or the "manager" account can also read groups => covered by C -- anonymous or the "manager" account cannot read groups but a user can => covered by A I therefore believe that the new code will cover all common use cases. The implementation either directly binds as the user, when `bindpattern` is not empty, or it binds anonymous or against the manger DN to search for the user DN entry. If it directly bound against the user DN, the user is already authenticated. It will then only check that the user DN it found in the search is identical to the one it is currently bound against. If it was bound against a manager DN (or anonymously) it will bind against the found user DN to authenticate the user logging in, and will then rebind against the manager DN. When searching for groups in LDAP, if the search fails with a result code other than SUCCESS, the implementation will bind against the user DN, if it isn't already bound against it. It will then repeat the search for groups under the user authorization. This is to keep backwards compatible with the original behaviour A, in order to not break cases where the LDAP setup would deny a manager account to search for groups but allow it for normal users. To achieve this the implementation introduces an internal `LdapConnection` class that wraps the connection and keeps bind state, so that a rebind as a user is possible. This also fixes a resource leak where the connection was not closed in case that the initial bind as the manager account did not succeed. This commit would fix gitblit-org#920
Allow to use the LDAP AuthProvider with a LDAP Server
prohibiting anonymous searches but without providing
a manager password : searches are made on behalf of
the authenticated user.