When user logs in he enter the password. Then the credentials are passed to the LDAP server to validate them (portal tries to create ldap connection using them). At any stage portal doesn't read the password attribute value from LDAP. The main difference with the DB is that portal reads the hash of the password from database table to validate it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4177798#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...