Categories
Network Technologies Security

LDAP authentication on the F5 BigIP without Access Policy Manager

Intro
I recently received revised guidelines for dmz best practices which mentioned a requirement to implement application-independent authentication using the F5 web application firewall. I had never heard of it and didn’t think it was possible without buying the very expensive APM license. They insisted it was possible and even easy to do. So I investigated and found they were right!

The details
This is a feature added around version 11.4.

On the F5, go to Local Traffic|Profiles|Authentication|Configurations and create a new configuration. Here you put in the essential LDAP information and give these settings a name such as myLDAP. I needed to set Login Attribute to cn. Then go to …Authentication|Profiles and create a new one. Set parent profile as LDAP and associate the configvuration myLDAP to it. Rule can be _sys_auth_ldap.

In the virtual server Properties tab look for the section Authentication Profiles. Pick the profile you created.

That’s it! Your virtual server now has application-independent authentication using your preferred LDAP source.

So far I only tested against an LDAP source that doesn’t require an ldap bind. But I did successfully test against an ldaps source (which runs on port 636 and encrypts the communication using SSL. I got that to work setting SSL to Enabled and essentially taking the other SSL-related default values.

Conclusion
We show how to implement application-independent authentication on an F5 BigIP which only has the local traffic manager (LTM) license. We used an LDAP directory for the authentication source. I believe a certificate mechanism would also have been possible. As it happens our LDAP source was not an Active Directory (AD) tree, but I believe it would be possible to use that as well. We also did not limit access to any specific group, but that is probably possible as well.

Categories
Admin Linux Network Technologies

Querying AD via LDAP – reference documentation

Intro
Suppose you managed to stuff the user’s ID into the description field of every computer object. Then independently the name of the computer object appears in a log such as a web server log and you want to know the user associated with that.

These examples show how to get at that description field from the computer object name.

The details

ldapsearch is a useful tool. I have two versions of it installed on Windows 7 and different Unix/Linux versions. The syntax is slightly different in all cases. Let’s assume the AD domain DRJOHNSAD is mapped to DNS domain drjohnsad.drjohns.net, and the user is drj. Then we have:

Linux
> ldapsearch -h drjohnsad.drjohns.net -b dc=drjohnsad,dc=drjohns,dc=net -D ‘drjohnsad\drj’ -W cn=computerName description

The -W switch prompts for the password. That is a nice switch, and not available in all versions of ldapsearch. If not, use -w password instead. drjohnsad\drj needs the single quote to prevent the “\” character from being treated as a special character by the shell. Windows doesn’t need that.

Windows 7 CMD Window

Oracle-provided ldapsearch

> ldapsearch -h drjohnsad.drjohns.net -b dc=drjohnsad,dc=drjohns,dc=net -D drjohnsad\drj -q cn=computerName description

So -q is used to prompt for a password instead of Linux’s -W.

Lotus Notes ldapsearch

> ldapsearch -h drjohnsad.drjohns.net -b dc=drjohnsad,dc=drjohns,dc=net -D drjohnsad\drj -w password cn=computerName description

You gotta put in the password on the command line.

Of course Windows also has applications which can be used for ldap queries in a GUI, but I don’t use them.

Conclusion
The syntax for a simple ldap query against an AD domain controller is shown.