- Overview
- Using the Graphical User Interface
- RADIUS Accounting
- Diameter
- Extensible Authentication Protocols
- Using Replication
- Using Identity Caching
- Using Prepaid Billing
- Using Cisco Prime Access Registrar Server Features
- Directing RADIUS Requests
- Using FastRules to Process Packet Flow
- Using LDAP
- Using Open Database Connectivity
- SIGTRAN-M3UA
- Using SNMP
- Backing Up the Database
Using LDAP
This chapter provides information about using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with Cisco Prime Access Registrar (Prime Access Registrar) to access information directories. You can use Prime Access Registrar to authenticate and authorize access requests by querying user information through LDAP.
Note
Prime Access Registrar supports LDAP version 3 and LDAP version 2 directory servers.
Configuring LDAP
To use LDAP in Prime Access Registrar, use aregcmd to do the following:
1. Configuring the LDAP Service.
2. Configuring an LDAP RemoteServer.
3. Setting LDAP As Authentication and Authorization Service.
After you issue the save command, Prime Access Registrar attempts to validate the configuration, checks for all required properties, and ensures there is no logic error. If the validation is successful, Prime Access Registrar saves the configuration to the MCD database. When Prime Access Registrar is reloaded, it shuts down any current LDAP connections and builds new connections for the configured LDAP remote servers.
Configuring the LDAP Service
You configure an LDAP service under /Radius/Services. When you define an LDAP service under /Radius/Services, you must set its type to LDAP.
Table 12-1 describes the LDAP service properties.
MultipleServersPolicy
Use the MultipleServersPolicy property to configure the LDAP remote servers in RoundRobin mode, or the default Failover mode applies. When set to Failover, Prime Access Registrar directs requests to the first server in the /Radius/Services/LDAP/RemoteServers list. If that server should fail or go offline, Prime Access Registrar redirects all requests to the next server in the list. The process continues until Prime Access Registrar locates an online server.
When set to RoundRobin, Prime Access Registrar directs each request to the next server in the RemoteServers list to share the resource load across all listed servers.
RemoteServers
Use the RemoteServers directory to list one or more remote servers to process access requests. The servers must also be listed in order under /Radius/RemoteServers.
The order of the RemoteServers list determines the sequence for directing access requests when MultipleServersPolicy is set to RoundRobin mode. The first server in the list receives all access requests when MultipleServersPolicy is set to Failover mode.
Configuring an LDAP RemoteServer
Use the aregcmd command add to add LDAP servers under /Radius/RemoteServers. You must configure an LDAP RemoteServer object for each RemoteServer object you list under /Radius/Services/LDAP/RemoteServers.
The Name, Protocol, Port, HostName, BindName, BindPassword, SearchPath, and Filter properties must be configured to use an LDAP remote server.
The Name, Protocol, Port, HostName, SearchPath, and Filter properties must be configured to enable Bind-Based Authentication.
Note You can leave the BindName, BindPassword, UserPasswordAttribute, PasswordEncryptionStyle and DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval properties blank when you configure the Bind-Based Authentication feature in Prime Access Registrar.
Table 12-2 describes the LDAP Remote Server properties.
DNS Look Up and LDAP Rebind Interval
Prime Access Registrar provides a DNS Look-up and LDAP Rebind feature that enables you to use a smart DNS server for LDAP hostname resolution, allows you to query a DNS server at set intervals to resolve the LDAP hostname, and optionally rebind to the LDAP server, if necessary.
When you configure Prime Access Registrar to use an LDAP directory server, you can specify the hostname of the LDAP directory server. The hostname can be a qualified or an unqualified name. You can also specify a timeout period after which Prime Access Registrar will again resolve the hostname. If the IP address returned is different from the previous, Prime Access Registrar establishes a new LDAP bind connection.
The DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval property specifies the timeout period after which the Prime Access Registrar server will attempt to resolve the LDAP hostname to IP address (DNS resolution). When you do not modify DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval, the default value zero indicates the server will perform normal connection and binding only at start-up time or during a reload. Unless you change the default to a value greater than zero, the server will not perform periodic DNS lookups.
Prime Access Registrar maintains and uses the existing bind connection until a new one is established to minimize any performance impact during the transfer. Prime Access Registrar ensures that no requests are dropped or lost during the transfer to a new LDAP binding.
Set the DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval using a numerical value and the letter H for hours or M for minutes, such as in the following examples:
set DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval 15M—performs DNS resolution every 15 minutes
Note We recommend that you do not set DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval to a value less than 15 minutes to minimize its effect on server performance.
set DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval 1h—performs DNS resolution every hour
Configure the DNS Look-up and LDAP Rebind
To configure the DNS Look-up and LDAP Rebind,
Step 1 Log into the Prime Access Registrar server, and use aregcmd to navigate to //localhost/Radius/Remoteservers. If necessary, add the LDAP server, or change directory to it.
cd /Radius/RemoteServers/ldap-serv1/
Step 2 Set the DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval property to the interval time desired.
set DNSLookupAndLDAPRebindInterval 30 M
LDAP Rebind Failures
Prime Access Registrar records any name resolution failures, bind successes and failures, and the destination hostname and IP address in the log file. At trace level 3, Prime Access Registrar also logs the time of any new bind connections and the closing of any old bind connections.
If either the name resolution or bind attempt fail, Prime Access Registrar continues using the existing bind connection until the timeout has expired again. If there is no existing bind connection, Prime Access Registrar marks the remote server object as down.
LDAPToRadiusMappings
Configure LDAPToRadiusMappings with a list of name/value pairs where name is the name of the data store attribute to retrieve from the user record and the value is the name of the RADIUS attribute to set to the value of the data store attribute retrieved.
Values stored in a multivalued field in the LDAP directory are mapped to multiple RADIUS attributes, For example, if the LDAPToRadiusMappings has the following entry:
The following LDAP fields in the user's record will create four Cisco-AVPair attributes in the user's Access-Accept RADIUS packet:
LDAPToEnvironmentMappings
LDAPToEnvironmentMappings comprises a list of attribute name/value pairs or AV pairs where the name is the name of the data store attribute to retrieve from the user record, and the value is the name of the Environment variable to set to the value of the LDAP attribute retrieved.
For example, when the LDAPToEnvironmentMappings has the entry: group =User-Group, the RemoteServer retrieves the attribute from the LDAP user entry for the specified user, uses the value returned, and sets the Environment variable User-Group to that value.
Support for LDAP Multi-Value Attributes Mapping
LDAP attributes mapping support has been enhanced to accommodate multiple values to get mapped with the information fetched from LDAP. The LDAP query returns multi-value attributes in LDAP Authentication services. These will get mapped to corresponding attributes based on the LDAPToEnvironmentMappings. E.g. the parameter Data under LDAPToEnvironmentMappings is mapped to two values NAS-Identifier and Reply-Message using a supported delimiter configured using the LDAPMultiValDelimiter parameter under /Radius/Advanced. The default delimiter is comma (,).
Following example shows a sample CLI of the LDAP configuration:
The LDAP data is mapped to environment dictionary variables and we need to put them in the response dictionary if they are required to be sent in the response packet.
A sample script is shown below:
Following is a sample CLI with the LDAPMultiValDelimiter parameter configuration:
LDAPToCheckItemMappings
LDAPToCheckItemMappings comprises a list of LDAP AV pairs which must be present in the RADIUS access request and must match, both name and value, for the check to pass. Prime Access Registrar will first authenticate the user's password in the Access-Request before validating the check item attributes.
Configuring LDAP Remote Server over SSL
Prime Access Registrar allows you to configure LDAP remote server over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. For this, you must do the following under /Radius/RemoteServers/LDAP:
- Set the UseSSL parameter to TRUE.
- Configure the port value accordingly. Default SSL port value is 636.
Till release 9.1.x, Prime Access Registrar supports LDAP configuration with Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol up to TLSv1.0. From release 9.2 onwards, Prime Access Registrar supports TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2, and TLSv1.3 (Support for SSL3 and TLSv1.0 versions is deprecated).
The following parameters are added under /Radius/Advanced/ to support this feature:
- CertificateDBPath—Path that contains valid client certificates for the LDAP server. Any changes to this parameter requires a restart of Prime Access Registrar.
- LDAPTLSVersion—Supported TLS versions for the LDAP server, which could be TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2, or TLSv1.3. Default is TLSv1.2. Any changes to this parameter requires at least a reload of Prime Access Registrar.
The following is a sample CLI of the LDAP remote server configuration over SSL:
Setting LDAP As Authentication and Authorization Service
Use aregcmd to configure the LDAP Service as the default authentication and authorization service under /Radius as in the following:
Saving Your Configuration
When you use aregcmd to save your configuration, Prime Access Registrar does the following:
- Attempts to validate the configuration
- Checks for all required parameters
- Ensures there are no logic errors
If the validation is successful, Prime Access Registrar saves the configuration to the MCD database. When you reload, Prime Access Registrar shuts down any current LDAP connections and builds new connections for the configured LDAP servers.
CHAP Interoperability with LDAP
If the you plan to use CHAP authentication with an LDAP backing store, the password in LDAP must be stored as clear text. This is due to the one-way hash used by the CHAP, crypt, SHA-1, and SSHA encryption algorithms.
Allowing Special Characters in LDAP Usernames
This feature allows you to use special characters in LDAP usernames. The allowable special characters are *, (,), and \. These special characters can be included in the string passed to LDAP as the LDAP username value (usually the RADIUS username attribute).
The default of EscapeSpecialCharInUserName is FALSE. To enable this feature, use aregcmd to set the EscapeSpecialCharInUserName attribute in /Radius/RemoteServers/ldap-server to TRUE, as shown in the following example.
cd /Radius/RemoteServers/ldap-server
set EscapeSpecialCharInUserName TRUE
EscapeSpecialCharinUserName = TRUE
Note This feature supports the LDAP V3 library.
Dynamic LDAP Search Base
A new environment variable, Dynamic-Search-Path (see rex.h), can be used to set the dynamic LDAP search base. If this environment variable is defined for an LDAP service, it will override the default LDAP search base defined in the LDAP Remote Server configuration. This allows the LDAP search base to be configured on a per-user basis.
For example, you could match the search base to the organization and domain (in a Tcl script called from /Radius/IncomingScript):
set user [ $request get User-Name ]
if { [ regexp {^[^@]+@([^\.]+)\.(.+)$} $user m org domain ] } {
$environ put Dynamic-Search-Path "ou=$org,ou=people,o=$domain"
Analyzing LDAP Trace Logs
Prime Access Registrar records in the log files any name resolution failures, bind successes and failures, and the destination hostname and IP address. At trace level 3, Prime Access Registrar logs the time of any new bind connections and the closure of any old bind connections and also information about user login requests and reply messages.
This section contains the following topics:
Successful Bind Message
The following message is logged in the name_radius_1_ trace file, when the Prime Access Registrar server successfully binds to the LDAP server. In this case, spatula-u5 is the LDAP server listening on port number 389.
Bind Failure Messages
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when Prime Access Registrar server fails to bind to the LDAP server.
Messages like those above could indicate that the hostname specified does not resolve to the correct IP address of the LDAP server or the configured port number might not be the port on which the LDAP server listens.
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when Prime Access Registrar server fails to bind to the LDAP server.
The Distinguished Name (DN) provided in the BindName property was invalid. The DN provided in the BindName property should contain the exact string used in the directory server to define the object.
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when Prime Access Registrar server fails to bind to the LDAP server.
The messages above indicate that the password provided in the BindPassword property was incorrect.
Login Failure Messages
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when user jane tries to login. These messages indicate that user jane does not have a record in the directory server or the SearchPath property has an incorrect value. The SearchPath property should have the directory where the user record is stored in the directory server.
Notice how the messages specify the service, remote LDAP server, username, and contents of the Access-Reject packet.
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when user bob tries to login. These messages indicate that user bob tried to login with an incorrect password.
The following messages are logged in the name_radius_1_trace file, when user bob tries to login. These messages indicate the user record for user bob does not contain an attribute called pass. The UserPasswordAttribute property has an incorrect value called pass. The UserPasswordAttribute property should have the attribute name in the directory records where the user password is stored.
Note Remember to reload the Prime Access Registrar server after any changes to the LDAP server configuration.
Bind-Based Authentication for LDAP
Prime Access Registrar supports most of the LDAP servers. But, a few of the LDAP servers do not support the functionality of Prime Access Registrar, which gets the passwords from the LDAP and matches them in Prime Access Registrar.
The bind-based authentication feature in Prime Access Registrar allows you to use any LDAP server; it verifies the password in the LDAP database instead of the Prime Access Registrar database. When Prime Access Registrar receives a request, it sends the username and password to the LDAP server. The LDAP server searches for a match, and approves the request if it finds a matching user credential in its database. It rejects the request if it does not find any matching credentials.
Configuring Bind-Based Authentication for LDAP
To configure the bind-based authentication for LDAP,
Step 2 Create an LDAP service.
[ //localhost/Radius/Services/ldap ]
Step 3 Create the LDAP Remote Server Object.
[ //localhost/Radius/RemoteServers/ldap ]
set Port < remote ldap server prt numer >
set HostName < remote ldap server name/ipaddress >
set SearchPath < configured in ldap server >
set UseBindBasedAuthentication TRUE
set DefaultAuthenticationServic e < ldap service name >
set DefaultAuthorizationService < ldap service name >
Step 4 Save the configuration.
Step 5 Restart the application.
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