Password Settings Objects: Difference between revisions

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Prior to supporting PSOs, Samba Administrators could only configure password settings for ''all'' users in the domain. E.g. if you wanted to enforce that system admins have longer, more-secure passwords, then ''every'' user had to conform to the same password requirements.
Prior to supporting PSOs, Samba Administrators could only configure password settings for ''all'' users in the domain. E.g. if you wanted to enforce that system admins have longer, more-secure passwords, then ''every'' user had to conform to the same password requirements.


PSOs allow AD administrators to override the domain password policy settings for specific users, or groups of users. For example, PSOs can force certain users to have longer password lengths, or relax the complexity constraints for other users, and so on. PSOs can be applied to groups or to individual users.
PSOs allow AD administrators to override the domain's password policy settings and configure finer-grain password-settings for specific users, or groups of users. For example, PSOs can force certain users to have longer password lengths, or relax the complexity constraints for other users, and so on. PSOs can be applied to groups or to individual users.


=== How to configure it ===
=== How to configure it ===

Revision as of 21:35, 13 September 2018

Overview

Added in Samba version: 4.9

Password Settings Objects (PSOs) are an AD feature that's also known as Fine-Grained Password Policies (FGPP). In AD, the password settings control:

  • Minimum password length and complexity requirements when a user changes their password.
  • Password history length: prevents a user from re-using a previous password again.
  • Minimum and maximum password age: how frequently the user can/must change their password.
  • Account lockout: the threshold of unsuccessful login attempts before locking a user out of their account, and the duration they're locked out for.

Prior to supporting PSOs, Samba Administrators could only configure password settings for all users in the domain. E.g. if you wanted to enforce that system admins have longer, more-secure passwords, then every user had to conform to the same password requirements.

PSOs allow AD administrators to override the domain's password policy settings and configure finer-grain password-settings for specific users, or groups of users. For example, PSOs can force certain users to have longer password lengths, or relax the complexity constraints for other users, and so on. PSOs can be applied to groups or to individual users.

How to configure it

PSOs can be configured and applied to users/groups using the samba-tool domain passwordsettings pso set of commands. Refer to samba-tool domain passwordsettings pso --help for more detail. The PSO commands:

  • Manage the PSOs themselves, i.e. configure the password settings using 'create' or 'set' sub-commands. There's also 'delete', 'list', and 'show' commands.
  • Control what PSO applies to a particular user. Use the 'apply' and 'unapply' to link a PSO to a particular group or user.

Many different PSOs can apply to the same user (either directly, or via groups). When multiple PSOs apply to the same user, essentially the PSO with the best precedence takes effect. However, PSOs that apply directly to a user always trump PSOs inherited via group membership. To see what PSO takes effect for a given user, use samba-tool domain passwordsettings pso show-user.

If no PSO applies to a user, then the domain password settings apply. You can view/modify these using samba-tool domain passwordsettings show|set.

For Developers

How to test it

The following tests the DSDB behaviour, i.e. it asserts that the msDS-ResultantPSO attriubute is both constructed and applied correctly.

make test TESTS=ldap.password_settings

The following tests the samba-tool commands that configure PSOs.

make test TESTS=samba_tool.passwordsettings

TODO: I just noticed the above inconsistency and I will change it so both tests use 'passwordsettings'.

Note that there are also blackbox.password_settings tests that are unrelated to PSOs.

Where the code is located

The main PSO behaviour is controlled using a constructed attribute: msDS-ResultantPSO. This gets generated for user objects and its value is the DN of the PSO that applies to that user. So the logic that determines the correct PSO that applies to a user lives in operational.c, where the constructed attributes get generated.

If you grep the codebase for 'msDS-ResultantPSO', you should find all the places that try to use it. Basically wherever the code checked a password-setting attribute (e.g. like lockOutObservationWindow), we have to check if a PSO applies to that user, and if so then use the PSO attribute (which has a different name, i.e. msDS-LockoutObservationWindow) instead. samdb_result_effective_badPwdCount() is a good example of this.

get_pso_data_callback() is also notable, as it overrides the dsdb_user_pwd_settings struct's values (i.e. the domain password-settings) with the PSO's values. This struct gets used (as part of struct dsdb_control_password_change_status) in the password-hash module, to check password change operations.

Reference Docs

  • MS-ADTS documents how the msDS-ResultantPSO is determined (section 3.1.1.4.5.36).
  • MS-SAMR documents how the msDS-ResultantPSO is used to determine the effective password setting that gets applied to a user, i.e. Effective-LockoutThreshold, Effective-MinimumPasswordLength, etc. This is documented in section 3.1.1.5 Password Settings Attributes for Originating Update Constraints, but these Effective-XYZ values get referenced in several other places throughout the document, e.g. when calculating userAccountControl.