Hello list
We use ppolicy overlay for enforcing password lifecycle. Recently we faced with following issue and now I am trying to do some countermeasures to minimize risk of issue reoccurring. We use openldap server for user authentication. Here we store objects of real users as well as system users (for daemons and so on). We use redundant setup with two openldap servers running in mirror mode (multi-master). - Few days ago I find out that I wasn't able to log into service which uses this LDAP as authentication backend. - I find out that BOTH openldap servers are down (simply process wasn't listening) - checked LDAP database partition (dedicated partition for storing both DB and LOG BDB transaction files) and it was exhausted on both servers - reason of this exhaustion was a couple of BDB log files created just within last few minutes before daemon went down - based on slapd logs it seems that one system user (used by Nagios) had expired password - for which I forgot to set no password expiration - and it seems that those failed authentication tries caused this transaction logs to exhaust partition, as because for each failed bind, new "pwdFailureTime" value was added into object which is basically normal ldap modify operation causing transaction log to involve. - and as because that system user was used by Nagios for various purposes and LDAP BIND rate was really high, it effectively behave like DoS to kill my ldap servers due partition space exhausting
obviously I have fixed policy for that system user to keep password with unlimited expiration time. but anyway this DoS can be basically reproduced by any real user from outside to effectively kill those ldap servers. Redundancy with multiple servers does not provide any benefit as modifying pwdFailureTime is propagated over all cluster servers with same result to disk space. Also expanding partition will not help - it only extends service availability based on allocated space - and bdb log consuming was really huge - 15 log files (each with 10MB size) was created just within two minutes!!
now the question: did anybody considered this "effect" of using "pwdFailureTime" attribute? If so, what can I do to avoid this behavior to occur? Or how you are facing with this potential kind of issues? On one side it is fine to see some failure attempt history. Also keeping pwdFailureTime limited to some max number of values will not help as the LDAP modify operation have to be done anyway. For me the only useful possibility is to NOT use this attribute pwdFailureTime at all, but how to do it? I haven't found any possibility to disable using this attribute.
openldap-2.4.40/Centos6
many thanks for help
michal