AD password policy in Forms auth against AD

[Nils Magnus Englund]

Hey!

I've successfully followed Microsofts example on how to use Forms
authentication with Active Directory (from the "Building Secure ASP.NET
Applications" How To-section). However, I would very much like to use AD's
password policy features, specifically:

1. I want the user to get a warning e.g. two weeks before his/hers password
expires

2. I want the user to be able to change password (assuming the new password
meets the requirements set by the password policy)

3. If the password has expired, I want the user to still be able to log in,
but forced to change password in order to continue. (If this isn't possible
with AD, I could set the expiration time to a year, and force the user to
change password if there's less than 300 days left, in effect giving the
user two months password expiration with another 300 days before the user is
disabled/blocked).

Any ideas and/or suggestions? This will be used on a portal with several
hundred customers, where all customers will be stored in a AD (in their own
"External users" OU).

Thanks!


Regards,
Nils Magnus Englund

 

[Joe Kaplan \(MVP - ADSI\)]

This is going to be a lot of work if you plan to do this via LDAP. You'll
need a service account that can access the user account to read all of their
attributes and you'll need to learn how to determine all of the various
things that indicate these states. AD doesn't tell you why a bind failed
(due to lockout, disabled, expired, user must change password, etc. vs.
simple bad password), so you have to figure this out for yourself.

Joe K.

 

[Nils Magnus Englund]

Oh, that wasn't good news

Do you think it's a good idea to do it like this, or perhaps I should find
another method? I'm trying to avoid using any other storage medium than AD.


Regards,
Nils Magnus Englund

 

[Joe Kaplan \(MVP - ADSI\)]

You might look into the built in facility with IIS6 to do some password
management stuff. There is some sample application that comes with it that
handles a lot of these features. I'm not actually quite sure how it works
and haven't used it personally, but it is probably worth looking into.

The other stuff on you list you can definitely accomplish except using LDAP
to change password when the password has expired or the user is in "password
must be changed at next logon" state. It just takes some work.

I don't necessarily see a problem with using AD for this, although there is
a good point to be made from a security standpoint of putting these users in
a separate forest and setting up a one-way trust. You might also be able to
use ADAM to store these users. That will depend on the application services
you need to provide for them.

Joe K.