Authentication.Mechanisms.txt   [plain text]

Authentication Mechanisms
=========================

Plaintext authentication
------------------------

The simplest authentication mechanism is PLAIN. The client simply sends the
password unencrypted to Dovecot. All clients support the PLAIN mechanism, but
obviously there's the problem that anyone listening on the network can steal
the password. For that reason (and some others) other mechanisms were
implemented.

Today however many people use <SSL/TLS> [SSL.txt], and there's no problem with
sending unencrypted password inside SSL secured connections. So if you're using
SSL, you probably don't need to bother worrying about anything else than the
PLAIN mechanism.

Another plaintext mechanism is LOGIN. It's typically used only by SMTP servers
to let Outlook clients perform SMTP authentication. Note that LOGIN mechanism
is not the same as IMAP's LOGIN command. The LOGIN command is internally
handled using PLAIN mechanism.

Non-plaintext authentication
----------------------------

Non-plaintext mechanisms have been designed to be safe to use even without
<SSL/TLS> [SSL.txt] encryption. Because of how they have been designed, they
require access to the plaintext password or their own special hashed version of
it. This means that it's impossible to use non-plaintext mechanisms with
commonly used DES or MD5 password hashes.

If you want to use more than one non-plaintext mechanism, the passwords must be
stored as plaintext so that Dovecot is able to generate the required special
hashes for all the different mechanisms. If you want to use only one
non-plaintext mechanism, you can store the passwords using the mechanism's own
<password scheme> [Authentication.PasswordSchemes.txt].

With <success/failure password databases> [PasswordDatabase.txt] (e.g. PAM)
it's not possible to use non-plaintext mechanisms at all, because they only
support verifying a known plaintext password.

Dovecot supports the following non-plaintext mechanisms:

 * <CRAM-MD5.txt>: Protects the password in transit against eavesdroppers.
   Somewhat good support in clients.
 * <DIGEST-MD5> [Authentication.Mechanisms.DigestMD5.txt]: Somewhat stronger
   cryptographically than CRAM-MD5, but clients rarely support it.
 * APOP: This is a POP3-specific authentication. Similiar to CRAM-MD5, but
   requires storing password in plaintext.
 * <NTLM> [Authentication.Mechanisms.NTLM.txt]: Mechanism created by Microsoft
   and supported by their clients.
    * Optionally supported <using Samba's winbind>
      [Authentication.Mechanisms.Winbind.txt].
 * <GSS-SPNEGO> [Authentication.Mechanisms.Winbind.txt]: Similar to NTLM.
 * <GSSAPI> [Authentication.Kerberos.txt]: Kerberos v5 support.
 * RPA: Compuserve RPA authentication mechanism. Similar to DIGEST-MD5, but
   client support is rare.
 * ANONYMOUS: Support for logging in anonymously. This may be useful if you're
   intending to provide publically accessible IMAP archive.
 * OTP and SKEY: One time password mechanisms.
 * EXTERNAL: EXTERNAL SASL mechanism.

Configuration
-------------

By default only PLAIN mechanism is enabled. To use more, set:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
auth_mechanisms = plain login cram-md5
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

(This file was created from the wiki on 2011-11-16 14:09)