Kerberos support in Thunderbird

Sam Hartman hartmans at MIT.EDU
Wed Sep 14 19:09:49 EDT 2005


>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Alexander <jalex at cis.upenn.edu> writes:

    Jim> In article <43259153.6060500 at sxw.org.uk>,
    Jim> Simon Wilkinson <simon at sxw.org.uk> wrote:
    Jim> ]At the moment, if the 'Use Secure Authentication' option is
    Jim> set for a ]given protocol, the server at the other end offers
    Jim> GSSAPI as one of its ]supported SASL mechanisms, and the
    Jim> first call to init_secure_context for ]that server succeeds,
    Jim> we'll try to do GSSAPI auth against that server.  ]If GSSAPI
    Jim> fails, then we'll fall back to trying a different
    Jim> ]authentication scheme.

    Jim> This isn't a correct implementation, then. IMAP "secure
    Jim> authentication" is supposed to enable non-cleartext
    Jim> authentication when lower-level encryption isn't
    Jim> available. It makes no sense to have this enabled to enable
    Jim> kerberos auth.  You need to be able to separately specify
    Jim> that you want kerberos authentication, on a per-account
    Jim> basis, without the "Use Secure Authentication" option
    Jim> enabled. Since our server does not support secure
    Jim> authentication, your implementation does the following right
    Jim> now:

sorry, but I'm fairly sure the GSSAPI SASL mechanism falls within the
definition of IMAP secure authentication.

    Jim> (b) If my ticket cache is empty, Thunderbird correctly posts
    Jim> a "your server does not support secure authentication"
    Jim> dialog. My key manager never prompts me to obtain a ticket.

On Mac and Windows this is not at all what I'd expect.  I'd expect you
to be prompted to get tickets.

--Sam



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