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Funding: Please consider sponsoring this project as the code base has been live since late 90's and requires a significant effort to keep up with modern environments. Any amount helps!

poppassd-ceti

An Eudora and NUPOP change password server that allows user password change on PAM based systems via a simple POP3-like protocol. This daemon is frequently used as a backend for web based password change interfaces.

Features

  • Uses PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) so all system-wide controls (such as password quality restrictions) are still enforced
  • Does not call any external programs with SUID permissions (as CGI wrappers for passwd do)
  • Simple, clean code with no known security issues since 2002

Security model

Poppassd operates over standard input and output exclusively. On modern Linux servers the network socket is expected to be handled entirely by systemd.socket. On legacy FreeBSD it's expected to be run from inetd and from xinetd on legacy Linux servers.

Authentication and actual password change are handled exclusively by PAM on all systems.

In the intended usage model of remote network applications or local web applications connect to the poppassd port over TCP, which creates a clear trust boundary and avoids potentially dangerous shell script operations using SUID or expect as seen in some other solutions to the same problem.

On modern Linux servers the systemd poppassd.service uses a reasonable set of systemd hardening features to further reduce the attack surface.

Configuration

Poppassd uses PAM definitions from /etc/pam.d/poppassd for authentication of users and password change. Any local policies such as LDAP authentication, login times, password quality enforcement should be configured there per PAM System Administrator's Guide. Default PAM configuration does not have any provisions to restrict number of login attempts per user, so this must be configured in PAM as well. The daemon itself however introduces a delay after each unsuccessful login attempt which to some extent reduces effectiveness of password bruteforcing.

Use systemctl edit --full poppassd.socket to change default listening port (default 106/tcp) or bind address (default localhost).

Protocol

Poppassd implements a simple, text based protocol for user authentication and password change:

200 poppassd
USER username
200 Your password please
PASS old_password
200 Your new password please
NEWPASS new_password
200 Password changed
QUIT
200 Bye

Server responses starting with 200 are successs, 500 are errors:

200 poppassd
USER username
200 Your password please.
PASS old_password
500 Old password is incorrect

Integration with web applications requires that the application connects over TCP localhost:106 and speaks the above protocol using the data supplier by the user.

Installation

Prerequisites:

  • RPM based (RedHat, CentOS etc): yum install pam pam-devel cmake
  • APT based (Debian, Ubuntu etc): apt-get install libpam0g libpam0g-dev cmake

Installation from source:

git clone https://github.com/kravietz/poppassd-ceti.git
cd poppassd-ceti
cmake .
make
sudo make install

Since version 1.8.9 the default deployment method on Linux is systemd.socket: systemd handles the port 106/tcp and starts poppassd@.service instance on new connection. Locations of installed files:

  • /usr/local/sbin/poppassd
  • /etc/systemd/system/poppassd.socket
  • /etc/systemd/system/poppassd.service
  • /etc/pam.d/poppassd

The service files are not installed Linux servers without systemd and FreeBSD. Service definition is up to the administrator on these servers.

Testing

Testing is as simple as poppassd works on standard input (as root):

sudo /usr/local/sbin/poppassd
200 poppassd
USER kravietz
200 Your password please
PASS wie9on2cheB7oojeokai
200 Your new password please
NEWPASS eW4ieLieYieN6iefaith
200 Password changed
QUIT
200 Bye

If it does not work, check journalctl -xe or /var/log/auth.log on old systems. The most frequent problem are PAM configuration issues.

If it works locally but doesn't work over localhost:106 you may need to use systemctl edit --full poppassd.service and disable some of the systemd hardening settings as they might be too restrictive on your system.

Credits

This program was initially based on poppassd by John Norstad j-norstad@nwu.edu, Roy Smith roy@nyu.edu and Daniel L. Leavitt dll@mitre.org. Shadow file update code taken from shadow-960810 by John F. Haugh II jfh@rpp386.cactus.org and Marek Michalkiewicz marekm@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl. A number of people (listed below) have contributed with suggestions and fixes.

Versions

  • Version 1.8.10 - Include more portable PAM configuration, build fixes for FreeBSD
  • Version 1.8.9 - Improve error handling and reporting, add configuration files for systemd (@imilos), documentation updates
  • Version 1.8.8 - Now getstate() takes care of PAM message interpretation, better handling of PAM LDAP and Cracklib modules by Jinesh K J jinesh_kj@rediffmail.com
  • Version 1.8.7 - Peter Colberg optimized the build configuration to make distribution builds easier
  • Version 1.8.6 - František Hanzlík helped me refresh poppassd and move it to GitHub; the program is now compiled with autotools and includes several security improvements
  • Version 1.8.4 - Steven Danz fixed one bug where PAM errors (like cracklib complaints) were actually not preventing the user from changing the password. Now, if cracklib reports a weak password, it won't be accepted. To return to the previous default behaviour, remove cracklib from poppassd PAM configuration.
  • Version 1.8.3 - has changed the default PAM service name from "passwd" to "poppassd" (Radoslaw Antoniuk) and some more cleanups on password and username length (Mihail Vidiassov). Also added configuration hints from Brian Kircher.
  • Version 1.8.2 - has some cleanups in maximum username and password length checking and more verbose logging. It also supports passwords with space inside thanks to suggestion from Adam Conrad.
  • Version 1.7 - uses PAM. Thanks to Mikolaj Rydzewski mikir@kki.net.pl for giving me a clue how to use PAM conversion function in his wwwpasswd.
  • Version 1.5 - fixes bug which caused usernames containing characters like underscore "_" to be ignored. I've also added new compilation flag -DALLOW_NULL_PASSWORDS (needed for automated accounts creation).
  • Version 1.0 - works on shadow files directly