1:58 a.m.
Hi Bruno,
ideally the application should not create a default password for the
admin. The reason is that it goes into production and gets forgotten.
But in practice, applications create a default password which gets
changed after the first deployment. This is what you are doing.
Since the session management is handled by the application, PicketLink
has no ability to check whether there are concurrent sessions active.
I understand your concern that there is a small window after application
deployment where an attacker may control the application by changing the
admin password. This is mitigated either by not having a default
password (change in DB directly after deployment) or change the password
right after deployment.
Answers from the team are welcome.
Regards,
Anil
On 08/05/2013 04:09 PM, Bruno Oliveira wrote:
Good morning, on AeroGear we have the following scenario with
PicketLink
beta5:
- Default user "admin" which must change her password at first
deployment, otherwise she will not be able to login
During the startup we have the following piece of code:
@Singleton
@Startup
public class PicketLinkDefaultUsers {
@Inject
private IdentityManager identityManager;
@PostConstruct
public void create() {
User adminUser = identityManager.getUser("admin");
Developer admin = new Developer();
admin.setLoginName("admin");
this.identityManager.add(admin);
this.identityManager.updateCredential(admin, new
Password("123"), new Date(), expirationDate());
Role roleDeveloper = new SimpleRole("admin");
this.identityManager.add(roleDeveloper);
identityManager.grantRole(admin, roleDeveloper);
}
//Expiration date of the password
private Date expirationDate() {
Calendar expirationDate = Calendar.getInstance();
expirationDate.add(Calendar.HOUR, -1);
return expirationDate.getTime();
}
}
On login:
public boolean login(User user, String password) {
credentials.setUserId(user.getLoginName());
credentials.setCredential(new Password(password));
if (identity.login() != Identity.AuthenticationResult.SUCCESS) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
Now to reset the password:
this.identityManager.updateCredential(admin, new Password(newPassword));
And here comes my question. At least to me it looks like is possible to
change admin's password by just guessing the username, my concern is
about an attacker being able to escalate privileges (I can be wrong). On
PicketLink do we have something internally like password matching? Or
maybe some mechanism to force user to change their password upon first
login? For example (just a very stupid example):
this.identityManager.updateCredential(admin, oldPassword, newPassword);
The correct solution (I guess) would be to check if that user has
already logged in and force admin to supply the new password, but the
method isLoggedIn will return false for credentials with status EXPIRED.
An alternative with the current scenario (maybe is just the lack of
knowledge in API usability) would be to validate and check credential
status.
Credentials credential = new UsernamePasswordCredentials("username", new
Password(password));
identityManager.validateCredentials(credential);
But I think that might exist something on PicketLink to verify if the
session exists, before reset user's password.
Any ideas?
-- abstractj