Live data from Hacker News

Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

forums.macrumors.com

31–40 of 89 posts

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#31

Why are they not using Kerberos and SSL though? Does this affect those users who actually do take security seriously or just the bare bones implementations that aren't safe anyways?

This got downvoted but is a perfectly valid question, since LDAP->OSX authentication is used virtually exclusively on internal networks where the assumption needs to be that attackers can see network traffic anyways.

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the fact that this issue doesn't effect many people means that it's not a serious security problem?

He's saying that since the issue doesn't affect many people it didn't get found right away. It is a serious security problem for businesses that use Mac OS X with LDAP. However, it's not a serious security problem for me.

It's been known for just under a month, since five days after OS X Lion was released, so that interpretation of his statement seems incorrect.

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's saying that since the issue doesn't affect many people it didn't get found right away. It is a serious security problem for businesses that use Mac OS X with LDAP. However, it's not a serious security problem for me.

It's been known for just under a month, since five days after OS X Lion was released, so that interpretation of his statement seems incorrect.

> This looks both real and a pretty serious issue (I wonder how it went by almost a month without getting picked up by the security community).

Followed by:

> Not many people in the security community use Mac servers in such a way that they need LDAP, and of those people, very few are running Lion on their servers.

Therefore, we see that Mr. Ptacek thinks "it went by almost a month without getting picked up by the security community" because "Not many people in the security community use Mac servers".

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#34
post #23

This is only an issue when binding to an OpenLDAP server. There may be additional issues with LDAP on Lion server, but this problem as reported is an issue with Lion clients bound to servers running OpenLDAP without Kerberos or SSL.

Your use of the word "only" here is misplaced. This is a very serious security issue that affects clients connecting to OpenLDAP.

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#35

First, this is a terrible bug. Shame on Apple for not rushing a fix, but... Enterprises should not be doing immediate upgrades to any operating system, no matter how sparkly. I'm still waiting to upgrade my MacBook, and it's just me. No OS release goes off without a hitch (though there are some pretty impressive Linux releases!).

Nothing worse that righteous preaching...who knows what the op reasons are for upgrading...there could be very compelling reasons to move very quickly especially with Apple. Some models of newer Mac won't run anything older than the current OS release

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#36
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's saying that since the issue doesn't affect many people it didn't get found right away. It is a serious security problem for businesses that use Mac OS X with LDAP. However, it's not a serious security problem for me.

It's been known for just under a month, since five days after OS X Lion was released, so that interpretation of his statement seems incorrect.

In the interest of expedience, let me be blunt: very few security researchers give a shit about how OS X Server uses LDAP.

We're all pretty busy lately, too.

(-2. You guys are funny. In case it matters: I'm not being snarky. They really don't).

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#37

What alarms me is that on both of my computers with Lion, about half of the time just clicking on a name on the login screen works without entering the password. Happens on my friend's Lion install as well.

I'm going to guess that this is very simple; he probably just has the option for requiring a password at login turned off, or is using Fast User Switching enabled (i.e., the user is question was not really logged out, so logging in and entering a password is not required), or something like this.

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#38
post #6

Can anyone confirm or deny that this is only an issue when authenticating to an OpenLDAP server (i.e. does it also affect authentication against Active Directory?) I will check it when I get to the office and update here. This could potentially be very serious.

Active directory works as you'd expect.

We just got some Lion iMacs and have not been able to keep them connected to the AD. It doesn't work as expect unfortunately.

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#39

What alarms me is that on both of my computers with Lion, about half of the time just clicking on a name on the login screen works without entering the password. Happens on my friend's Lion install as well.

There is an option "Require password after sleep or screen saver begins" in the Security preferences, general tab. I'll bet yours is set to something other than "immediately".

Re: Mac OS X Lion accepts any password when authenticating via LDAP

#40
Tells you something about Apple's testing methodology. QA team at Apple must be playing real fast and loose.

Being affected by 3 serious regressions in Lion (all filed as bugs and Apple closed them as duplicates, btw) - I get the feeling that Apple could do better at software engineering. (Alarms on iOS if you are still not convinced :) Just the fact that they release software that allows authentication without correct password means that they lack any kind of automated test case verification even for basic functionality - and this is basic functionality we are talking about, not some obscure thing that happens only when dozen different factors are combined or a thing that only happens once in billion tries.

Say what you will about Microsoft but in my several years of using Windows I rarely had these type of glaring issues even with the awful amount of hardware it supports. It might just be that Microsoft was forced to adopt better Engineering practices due to their situation - lot of complexity, huge impact potential, and lot of money at stake - 50% server market and the Server OS shares a whole lot with consumer version etc.

Not trying to troll - just my thoughts on something that I have always wondered - how Engineering culture varies between different successful software companies and to what effect.

Post reply on HN