Chapter 8. Identity Management security settings
Learn more about security-related features of Identity Management.
8.1. How Identity Management applies default security settings
By default, Identity Management (IdM) on RHEL 8 uses the system-wide crypto policy. The benefit of this policy is that you do not need to harden individual IdM components manually.
Red Hat recommends that you use the system-wide crypto policy. Changing individual security settings can break components of IdM. For example, Java in RHEL 8 does not fully support the TLS 1.3 protocol. Therefore, using this protocol can cause failures in IdM.
Additional resources
-
See the
crypto-policies(7)man page on your system
8.2. Anonymous LDAP binds in Identity Management
By default, anonymous binds to the Identity Management (IdM) LDAP server are enabled. Anonymous binds can expose certain configuration settings or directory values. However, some utilities, such as realmd, or older RHEL clients require anonymous binds enabled to discover domain settings when enrolling a client.
Additional resources
8.3. Disabling anonymous binds
You can disable anonymous binds on the Identity Management (IdM) 389 Directory Server instance by using LDAP tools to reset the nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access attribute.
These are the valid values for the nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access attribute:
-
on: allows all anonymous binds (default) -
rootdse: allows anonymous binds only for root DSE information -
off: disallows any anonymous binds
Red Hat does not recommend completely disallowing anonymous binds by setting the attribute to off, because this also blocks external clients from checking the server configuration. LDAP and web clients are not necessarily domain clients, so they connect anonymously to read the root DSE file to get connection information.
By changing the value of the nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access attribute to rootdse, you allow access to the root DSE and server configuration without any access to the directory data.
Certain clients rely on anonymous binds to discover IdM settings. Additionally, the compat tree can break for legacy clients that are not using authentication. Perform this procedure only if your clients do not require anonymous binds.
Prerequisites
- You can authenticate as the Directory Manager to write to the LDAP server.
-
You can authenticate as the
rootuser to restart IdM services.
Procedure
Change the
nsslapd-allow-anonymous-accessattribute torootdse.$ ldapmodify -x -D "cn=Directory Manager" -W -h server.example.com -p 389 Enter LDAP Password: dn: cn=config changetype: modify replace: nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access: rootdse modifying entry "cn=config"Restart the 389 Directory Server instance to load the new setting.
# systemctl restart dirsrv.target
Verification
Display the value of the
nsslapd-allow-anonymous-accessattribute.$ ldapsearch -x -D "cn=Directory Manager" -b cn=config -W -h server.example.com -p 389 nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access | grep nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access Enter LDAP Password: # requesting: nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access: rootdse
Additional resources
- nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access in Directory Server 11 documentation
- Anonymous LDAP binds in Identity Management
