CAS Password Manager

NOTICE

THIS PROJECT IS NOT CURRENTLY MAINTAINED. It is built against old CAS version (3.5.0) and most probably will require a significant amount of effort to modernize and bring it up to date with the current versions of CAS

• Drew Mazurek dmazurek@unicon.net
• Drew Wills awills@unicon.net
• Unicon, Inc.

Background

This project is an extension of the CAS LPPE work which has been integrated into CAS 3.5. The original password manager work was performed for Onondaga Community College (http://www.sunyocc.edu), who graciously allowed us to make this product available to the public. The CAS 3.5 upgrade was sponsored by the University of Kansas (http://ku.edu) and by the Unicon CAS Cooperative Support program (http://www.unicon.net/support/cooperative).

Features

The CAS PM extension provides basic password management tasks to users with minimal disruption to their browsing process. If their password has expired, they're asked to change it during the login flow and then they're sent on to the application they were initially trying to access. The idea was to make password management as simple and unobtrusive as possible for the end user. Features include:

• expired password reset
• forgotten password reset using security questions based on prepopulated (e.g. ID number, birthday, etc.) or custom security questions.
• force users to configure their custom security question if one is not set. (Configurable.)
• support for Active Directory and OpenLDAP. (Password expiration features aren't available for OpenLDAP.)
• configurable password security level enforcement (E.g. 8 characters, upper/lowercase, etc.)
• password change lockout with too many incorrect security question attempts
• ReCAPTCHA integration to aid against scripted attacks

Additionally, Active Directory users receive the benefits of the LPPE integration that provides enhanced login failure messages in the following situations:

• account is disabled
• account is expired
• account is attempting to login at an unaccepted time
• account is attempting to login from an unaccepted workstation
• account must change password on login (handled by password manager)
• account password will expire soon (handled by password manager)

Build & Installation

Prerequisites

• Maven 3+ (http://maven.apache.org)

• Git client (http://git-scm.com)

• This source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/unicon/cas-password-manager.git

• Recaptcha4j version 0.0.8:

Unfortunately, Recaptcha4j 0.0.8 is still not available through Maven. You'll have to download and install it in your local build machine's Maven repository:

$ wget 'http://recaptcha4j.googlecode.com/files/recaptcha4j-0.0.8.jar'

$ mvn install:install-file -Dfile=recaptcha4j-0.0.8.jar \
    -DgroupId=net.tanesha.recaptcha4j -DartifactId=recaptcha4j \
    -Dversion=0.0.8 -Dpackaging=jar

You will also need to set up an account at http://www.google.com/recaptcha.

Configuration

After you have obtained the prerequisites and checked out the source code, there are a few files you will need to configure.

• src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring-configuration/passwordManagerContext.xml:

There are only two things you may need to configure in this file. One is the password security policy regular expression. By default passwords must be at least 8 characters and contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one digit. If you want to change that, modify the passwordRegex property of the changePasswordBeanValidator.

The other possible configuration option is the encryption algorithm if you're using OpenLDAP. If you're using OpenLDAP and don't set this, passwords will be stored unencrypted. (Active Directory automatically encrypts all passwords.) If you are running OpenLDAP, towards the bottom of the passwordManagerContext.xml, you'll see the section that you will need to uncomment.

• src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/cas.properties.example:

This file contains all of the CAS options you will need to set as well as the LPPE and password manager options. If you have any questions about basic (non-password manager) configuration, I recommend you look at CAS configuration documentation on the Jasig wiki (https://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASUM/Home).

The first step is to copy or rename this file to "cas.properties". Then read through the file and set the properties to match your environment. All of the configuration options in this file are annotated, so please read through the file and set everything appropriately.

• src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/view/jsp/default/ui/*.jsp and src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/classes/messages_en.properties:

Edit the views to your liking. This is a CAS overlay project, so if you need to edit a JSP file that isn't here, you can download the CAS Server 3.5 distribution and copy the file from there into this directory.

Building

To build the CAS server, run the following from the root of the project:

$ mvn clean package

If the build was successful, the CAS webapp can be found under target/cas.war. See the Jasig CAS documentation if you run into any issues building CAS.

Troubleshooting

Hopefully if you follow these instructions everything should work out fine. If not, however, the first step is to check your cas.log. If there are no obvious errors, try turning on debug logging. Edit cas/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.xml and change the log level for the org.jasig.cas.pm appender from INFO to DEBUG. Then check cas.log to see if you can spot anything that looks wrong.

This is (still) a pretty new project, so I'm not sure what can go wrong yet. :) If you do run into an issue, try emailing the CAS community discussion list. You can subscribe by visiting http://www.jasig.org/cas/mailing-lists. I'm on the list, so maybe I can help out!

To-Dos

There's no guaranteed timeline for any of the following, but the following are possible future improvements this project could use:

• ability to change security questions
• ability to have more than one custom security question. Hooks for this feature already exist, but it's not fully implemented.
• allow administrator to predefine a list of security questions
• add flags for enabling/disabling certain aspects of the password manager
• unit/integration tests would be nice
• add back-end security question stores other than LDAP (e.g. DBMS)