Authentication¶

Brute force attack prevention¶

GeoServer ships with a delay based brute force attack prevention system.

Brute force attack prevention settings¶

The mechanism works as follows:

• Each failed authentication request is made to wait between min and max seconds before getting an actual response back

• Each attempt to authenticate the same username in parallel fails immediately, regardless of whether the credentials were valid or not, with a message stating concurrent loging attempts are not allowed.

The first item slows down a single threaded attack to the point of making it ineffective (each failed attempt is logged along with the IP attempting access), the second item breaks multi-threaded attacks ability to scale. Login attempts are slowed down/blocked on all protocols, be either a OGC request, a REST call, or the UI.

A user trying to login from the user interface while another request is blocked waiting for the cool-down period to expire will see a message like the following:

Error message for parallel user interface login¶

A HTTP request (REST or OGC) will instead get an immediate 401 with a message like:

HTTP/1.1 401 User foo, 5896 concurrent login attempt(s) denied during the quiet period

A blessed set of IPs that can dodge the mechanism allows legit administrators to take control of the server even during an attack. The system only trusts the actual requestor IP, ignoring “X-Forwarded-For” headers, as they can be easily spoofed (this in turn requires the admin to access the system from a local network, without proxies in the middle, for the blessed IP to be recognized).

The maximum number of threads blocked configuration allows to setup the system so that an attacker can mis-use the system to simply block all service threads, by issuing requests with random user names (the system cannot determine if a username is valid or not, none of the authentication mechanisms provides this information for security reasons).

Considerations on how to setup the system:

• A small delay is normally more than enough to stop a brute force attack, resist the temptation of setting high delay values as they might end up blocking too many legit account and trigger the max blocked threads mechanism

• Ensure that the execluded networks are well protected by other means

• Set the maximum number of blocked threads to a value large allow peak hour legit logins (e.g., early morning when all the users start working) while still leaving room for successful authentication requests

• A clustered/load balanced setup will not share the state of blocked logins, each host tracks its local login failures.

Authentication filters¶

This section manages the Authentication Filters (adding, removing, and editing). Several authentication filters are configured by default (anonymous, basic, form, rememberme), but others can be added to the list.

List of authentication filters¶

Credentials From Headers filter¶

This filter allows gathering user credentials (username and password) from request headers in a flexible and configurable way.

Creating a new authentication filter fetching credentials from request headers¶

Option	Description
Name	Name of the filter
Username Header	Name of the Request Header containing the username
Regular Expression for Username	Regular Expression used to extract the username from the related Header. Must define a group that will match the username.
Password Header	Name of the Request Header containing the password
Regular Expression for Password	Regular Expression used to extract the password from the related Header. Must define a group that will match the password.
Parse Arguments as Uri Components	If checked username and password are uri deocded before being used as credentials

Authentication providers¶

This section manages the Authentication providers (adding, removing, and editing). The default authentication provider uses basic username/password authentication. JDBC and LDAP authentication can also be used.

Click Add new to create a new provider. Click an existing provider to edit its parameters.

List of authentication providers¶

Username/password provider¶

The default new authentication provider uses a user/group service for authentication.

Creating a new authentication provider with a username and password¶

Option	Description
Name	Name of the provider
User Group Service	Name of the user/group service associated with this provider. Can be any one of the active user/group services.

JDBC provider¶

The configuration options for the JDBC authentication provider are illustrated below.

Configuring the JDBC authentication provider¶

Option	Description
Name	Name of the JDBC connection in GeoServer
User Group Service	Name of the user/group service to use to load user information after the user is authenticated
Driver class name	JDBC driver to use for the database connection
Connection URL	JDBC URL to use when creating the database connection

LDAP provider¶

The following illustration shows the configuration options for the LDAP authentication provider. The default option is to use LDAP groups for role assignment, but there is also an option to use a user/group service for role assignment. Depending on whether this option is selected, the page itself will have different options.

Configuring the LDAP authentication provider using LDAP groups for role assignment¶

Configuring the LDAP authentication provider using user/group service for authentication¶

Option	Description
Name	Name of the LDAP connection in GeoServer
Server URL	URL for the LDAP server connection. It must include the protocol, host, and port, as well as the “distinguished name” (DN) for the root of the LDAP tree.
TLS	Enables a STARTTLS connection. (See the section on Secure LDAP connections.)
User DN pattern	Search pattern to use to match the DN of the user in the LDAP database. The pattern should contain the placeholder {0} which is injected with the uid of the user. Example: uid={0},ou=people. The root DN specified as port of the Server URL is automatically appended.
User Filter	LDAP Filter used to extract User data from LDAP database. Used alternatively to User DN pattern and combined with User Format to separate bind and user data extraction handling. Example: (userPrincipalName={0}). Gets user data searching for a single record matching the filter. This may contain two placeholder values: {0}, the full DN of the user, for example uid=bob,ou=people,dc=acme,dc=com {1}, the uid portion of the full DN, for example bob.
User Format	String formatter used to build username used for binding. Used alternatively to User DN pattern and combined with User Filter to separate bind and user data extraction handling. Example: {0}@domain. Binds user with the username built applying the format. This may contain one placeholder: {0}, the username, for example bob
Use LDAP groups for authorization	Specifies whether to use LDAP groups for role assignment
Bind before group search	Specifies whether to bind to LDAP server with the user credentials before doing group search
Group search base	Relative name of the node in the tree to use as the base for LDAP groups. Example: ou=groups. The root DN specified as port of the Server URL is automatically appended. Only applicable when the Use LDAP groups for authorization( parameter is **checked*.
Group search filter	Search pattern for locating the LDAP groups a user belongs to. This may contain two placeholder values: {0}, the full DN of the user, for example uid=bob,ou=people,dc=acme,dc=com {1}, the uid portion of the full DN, for example bob. Only applicable when the Use LDAP groups for authorization( parameter is **checked*.
Admin Group	Name of the group to be mapped to Administrator role (defaults to ADMINISTRATOR). Example: ADMIN. Adds the role ROLE_ADMINISTRATOR if the user belongs to a group named ADMIN (case insensitive)
Group Admin Group	Name of the group to be mapped to Group Administrator role (defaults to GROUP_ADMIN). Example: GROUPADMIN. Adds the role ROLE_GROUP_ADMIN if the user belongs to a group named GROUPADMIN (case insensitive)
User Group Service	The user/group service to use for role assignment. Only applicable when the Use LDAP groups for authorization parameter is cleared.
Enable Hierarchical groups search	Specifies whether to use Hierarchical LDAP groups search for role assignment
Max depth for hierarchical groups search	Specifies the max group search depth level to use with Hierarchical LDAP groups search. Use -1 for no limit. Only applicable when the Enable Hierarchical groups search( parameter is **checked*.
Nested group search filter	Search pattern for locating parent LDAP groups a group belongs to. This may contain two placeholder values: {0}, the full DN of the user, for example cn=it,ou=groups,dc=acme,dc=com {1}, the cn portion of the full DN, for example it. Only applicable when the Enable Hierarchical groups search( parameter is **checked*.

Authentication chain¶

This section selects the authentication chain. Currently, only one default authentication chain is available. For further information about the default chain, please refer to Authentication chain.

Selecting the authentication chain¶