Full_Name: Aravind Gottipati Version: 2.4.13 OS: Linux - RHEL5 URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/ Submission from: (NULL) (63.245.220.241)

I'd like to propose a change to how the password lockouts work. The current system does not differentiate between multiple bind attempts with a single (or even a few) incorrect password(s) vs. multiple bind attempts with different incorrect passwords.

In our case, this results in a ton of false positives when folks change their password, but don't propagate their password change to all the applications/machines that use it. This causes a bunch of un-necessary lockouts. A real crack attempt on the other hand would most likely try a bunch of passwords (none of which repeat).

I have posted the same on the openldap-software mailing lists and Jeff Clowser proposed a scheme that should work to solve the problem.

Record each failed bind attempt as a (hash,timestamp) pair. If there is another failed attempt, check the password against these (hash, timestamp) pairs and update the timestamp if the hash is found. If its a new password that hasn't been attempted before, then create a new (hash,timestamp) pair. Lock the account out if there are more than pwdMaxFailure hashes stored.

http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200901/msg00147.html