Hardening Samba as an AD DC: Difference between revisions

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Currently Samba will need to be restarted when these files are updated.
Currently Samba will need to be restarted when these files are updated.

=Samba compilation hardening=
Samba's build system and that of many Samba packages harden Samba against some attacks on the C codebase.

See [Samba_Security_Documentation#Hardening_practices|Samba compiler hardening] for details.


=AD DC configuration options to consider=
=AD DC configuration options to consider=

Revision as of 01:23, 1 June 2023

Other Guides

The Samba Team values the effort put by others into documenting Samba, and so rather than duplicate that work, please do first see:

Samba smb.conf options to set/not set

While this is not a comprehensive list, the below options some of which are defaults often disabled, and others are stronger options off by default should be carefully checked to confirm that Samba's behaviour is as strict as is possible in your organisation.

ldap server require strong auth

This smb.conf option was introduced due to the attacks on LDAP known as NTLM forwarding or 'pass the hash' attacks. If ldap server require storong auth it set to no or allow_sasl_over_tls then the authentication to an SMB server by a privileged user or computer can be redirected to our LDAP server, allowing impersonation.

A hardened installation will retain the default value of yes

See also notes on this change.

It is more secure to use Kerberos with Kerberos encryption directly.

Future possible hardening

Microsoft has chosen a different path to addressing this issue, and instead would like AD clients to include a session-specific value in the NTLMv2 response, known a channel binding. Samba doesn't set this as a client nor does it check this as a server, at this time. A future Samba may add a new option here allowing NTLM and Kerberos connections over TLS, when this is sent and checked.

ntlm auth

NTLM authentication is 56-bit encryption at best and compromised badly for well-known word lists.

For a passive attacker, the options no and allow-mschapv2 are at their core equally insecure, as they boil down to the same cryptography, but the latter option is permitted because MSCHAPv2 is harder to eliminate, is not presented on administrative interfaces and may be protected by a TLS tunnel.

A fully hardened installation should set this to disabled, to require Kerberos or simple-bind authentication only, as even NTLMv2 is quite poor security in 2023.

lanman auth

Samba 4.17 removed LanMan authentication, if you are running Samba 4.16 and earlier, ensure that lanman auth has the default setting of no

allow store nt hash

Related to the above, Samba 4.17 has an the allow store nt hash option, allowing Samba to avoid storing the NT hash. Well known for being unsalted the NT hash is required for NTLM, NTLMv2, and MSCHAPv2 authentication, as well as for arcfour-hmac-md5 Kerberos authentication. However in 2023 all of these authentication mechanisms are considered as weak, and should not be used on hardened networks.

The purpose of this option is to allow Samba to not store the NT hash that will not be used, as it presents a vulnerability if the DB is exposed.

A hardened installation will set the value never, which avoids this storage.

server min protocol, client min protocol, client ipc min protocol

Modern Samba versions default to SMB2 and above. A hardened Samba installation should not set server min protocol client min protocol or client ipc min protocol to values such as NT1, which enable the old SMB1 support.

Avoiding SMB1 avoids support for NTLMv2 without NTLMSSP, which is not as secure as NTLMv2 as used within NTLMSSP - eg as used in SMB2, as well as a significant body of older C code in Samba. The SMB message signing (integrity protection) protocols are also much better in SMB2.

smb1 unix extensions, unix extensions

This is only relevant if SMB1 is enabled.

The SMB1 unix extensions allow the creation of a server-side symlink to a user-chosen location, and significant work had to be done to avoid Samba following such a link. While this work is now complete, it is still better to never allow the creation of such symbolic links.

A hardened installation will retain the default of no.

NETLOGON Secure channel options

The default values of these options should not be changed: allow nt4 crypto = no, reject md5 clients = yes, server schannel require seal = yes, server schannel = yes

If specific client hosts need to use outdated NETLOGON cryptography, then see the smb.conf documentation for the per-host overrides that are permitted.

GnuTLS TLS option configuration

Samba can feed the GnuTLS cryptography provider an option string to describe the TLS protocols that should be supported and not supported. See GnuTLS manual for valid strings. The tls priority option is is useful to disable a newly-vulnerable TLS protocol. The default in Samba (and in modern GnuTLS) is set to ensure that SSLv3 is disabled.

Enforce stronger password quality (not upper/lower/special chars)

A hardened installation of Samba will set check password script to a secure script or binary that checks the most common cracked passwords as well as dictionary words. Samba provides an example crackcheck binary, but cracklib which it uses has been superseded by tools checking large breach databases.

Insecure DNS updates

Samba can be configured to allow un-authenticated clients to update Dynamic DNS records. The default value for allow dns updates is secure only and this should be kept.

Samba Host hardening

These are things to do, on the Samba host, to improve security of Samba and your AD Domain.

The Samba Team does not maintain these hardening methods, but does recommend using (eg) packages with them prepared and tested.

Apparmor

Samba as packaged for some distributions (SuSE has been observed) has an extensive AppArmor rule set to restrict Samba only to the parts of the filesystem that it requires access to. This should not be disabled.

SeLinux

Samba as packaged on Fedora and RHEL has SELinux rules set to likewise restrict Samba only to the parts of the filesystem that it requires access to. This should not be disabled.

TLS Configuration (LDAP over TLS, ldaps://, StartTLS)

Samba will autogenerate a TLS certificate for the LDAP service. This should be replaced with a properly signed certificate trusted and verified by the clients in your organisation.

The options tls cafile,tls certfile,tls crlfile,tls dh params file,tls keyfile control the location of these files.

Currently Samba will need to be restarted when these files are updated.

Samba compilation hardening

Samba's build system and that of many Samba packages harden Samba against some attacks on the C codebase.

See [Samba_Security_Documentation#Hardening_practices|Samba compiler hardening] for details.

Protected Users

Protected users, implemented in Samba 4.17 and later, are not permitted to use NTLM, are restricted from Kerberos delegations (were one server can act as the user to another) and have shorter ticket lifetimes. Windows clients also detect protected users and implement local protections for these accounts.

Password Policies

Samba supports domain-wide and Fine-Grained Password Policies / Password Setting Objects (PSOs).

The domain-wide policies can be set via GPO if apply group policies = yes is set, but the direct method is to update the values in LDAP or via samba-tool domain passwordsettings.

To configure fine-grained password policies, use samba-tool domain passwordsettings pso per Tranquil IT's Applying a password strategy with Samba-AD guide

The default values in Samba are

Password complexity: on
Store plaintext passwords: off
Password history length: 24
Minimum password length: 7
Minimum password age (days): 1
Maximum password age (days): 42
Account lockout duration (mins): 30
Account lockout threshold (attempts): 0
Reset account lockout after (mins): 30

These values match Windows, but should be strengthened in a hardened domain. A hardened domain should have a password lockout set (by changing the threashold from 0) and should have a much longer minimum password length.