WebAuth 4.5.0

Time to finally release three months of work!

This is a very large feature release for the multifactor support in WebAuth and for the integration with the user information service, which is the way that WebAuth interacts with local site policy. (Currently, you still have to write your own to a well-defined protocol, although we do hope to provide Perl modules to help with this in the future.)

The major driving motivation for this release is to add the infrastructure required to set long-lived persistent cookies in a browser that contribute factors to authentications, which allows WebAuth to support "remember this device" functionality and to only require multifactor from devices from which a user has not previously authenticated. This includes a new token type, new attributes the user information service can send (including a way to invalidate such tokens), and new data that's sent back to the user information service. The user information service also now has the ability to add arbitrary additional factors to the current authentication, something that is intended to provide a hook for a local help desk to bypass multifactor for a user for some time if required.

This release also contains substantial contributions by Benjamin Coddington at UVM to improve multifactor interactions, including sending the OTP type back to the user information service if WebLogin knows it, a mechanism for the user information service to communicate a message to the user that's displayed on the multifactor login page, opaque state that can be sent back and forth between WebLogin and the user information service, and the ability for the user information service to add specific authentication factors to the required set for a particular authentication.

Other improvements in multifactor handling include the ability to set a lifetime on factors obtained via OTP login, a fix for a long-standing bug where an initial multifactor factor would satisfy a session requirement for random multifactor, and logging of even ignored errors when contacting the user information service.

There are other changes too. This release touches almost every part of WebAuth. The change to WebAuthForceLogin in 4.4.0 was reverted since, on further consideration, the original semantics seemed more useful. Password change handling in WebLogin was fixed (it's been broken for some time). Apache 2.4 error logging for all modules is much improved, and mod_webauth and mod_webkdc now produce better error logs for all versions of Apache. And WebLogin now communicates password expiration times to its templates in seconds since epoch in addition to a pre-formatted English time for better localization support.

William Orr contributed a new WebAuthLdapOperationalAttribute directive for mod_webauthldap that allows it to query operational attributes and include them in the environemnt.

There are two backward-incompatible changes for WebLogin. First, WebAuth now supports a user checkbox indicating either to remember their login on that device or to not remember their login (local site templates can present it either way). However, proper implementation of this matching the normal expected wording of "remember me on this device" required changing the default, so a straight upgrade from an earlier version will result in no single sign-on. To preserve behavior, either a template change to add the checkbox (checked by default) or a configuration change are required.

Second, support for getting password expiration times directly with remctl to a kadmin-remctl backend has been removed in favor of using data from the user information service by way of the WebKDC.

Finally, I got to do a lot of cleanup of the API, fix diagosis of undef passed to Perl XS functions, and fixed a compilation error with Heimdal.

You can get the latest release from the official WebAuth distribution site or from my WebAuth distribution pages.

Posted: 2013-04-26 16:09 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-12-12 from thread modified 2022-04-09