Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

Prologue

I should have written this post like a decade ago, but laziness got the better of me.

I use TLS with IMAP and SMTP mail server. That means I encrypt the connection by protocol against the mail server and not by port (ssl Vs tls). Although I do not accept any authentication before STARTTLS command is being provided (that means no cleartext passwords in authentication), I was leaving the PLAIN TEXT authentication mechanism in the configuration. That’s not an actual problem unless you are already on the server and you are trying to connect on localhost but I can do better.

LDAP

I use OpenLDAP as my backend authentication database. Before all, the ldap attribute password must be changed from cleartext to CRAM-MD5

Typing the doveadm command from dovecot with the password method:

# doveadm pw

Enter new password:    test
Retype new password:   test
{CRAM-MD5}e02d374fde0dc75a17a557039a3a5338c7743304777dccd376f332bee68d2cf6

will return the CRAM-MD5 hash of our password (test)

Then we need to edit our DN (distinguished name) with ldapvi:

From:

uid=USERNAME,ou=People,dc=example,dc=org
userPassword: test

To:

uid=USERNAME,ou=People,dc=example,dc=org
userPassword: {CRAM-MD5}e02d374fde0dc75a17a557039a3a5338c7743304777dccd376f332bee68d2cf6

Dovecot

Dovecot is not only the imap server but also the “Simple Authentication and Security Layer” aka SASL service. That means that imap & smtp are speaking with dovecot for authentication and dovecot uses ldap as the backend. To change AUTH=PLAIN to cram-md5 we need to do the below change:

file: 10-auth.conf

From:

auth_mechanisms = plain

To:

auth_mechanisms = cram-md5

Before restarting dovecot, we need to make one more change. This step took me a couple hours to figure it out! On our dovecot-ldap.conf.ext configuration file, we need to tell dovecot NOT to bind to ldap for authentication but let dovecot to handle the authentication process itself:

From:

# Enable Authentication Binds
# auth_bind = yes

To:

# Enable Authentication Binds
auth_bind = no

To guarantee that the entire connection is protected by TLS encryption, change in 10-ssl.conf the below setting:

From:

ssl = yes

To:

ssl = required

SSL/TLS is always required, even if non-plaintext authentication mechanisms are used. Any attempt to authenticate before SSL/TLS is enabled will cause an authentication failure.

After that, restart your dovecot instance.

Testing

# telnet example.org imap

Trying 172.12.13.14 ...
Connected to example.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE STARTTLS AUTH=CRAM-MD5] Dovecot ready.

1 LOGIN USERNAME@example.org test

1 NO [ALERT] Unsupported authentication mechanism.
^]
telnet> clo

That meas no cleartext authentication is permitted

MUA

Now the hard part, the mail clients:

RainLoop

My default webmail client since v1.10.1.123 supports CRAM-MD5
To verify that, open your application.ini file under your data folder and search for something like that:

    imap_use_auth_plain = On
    imap_use_auth_cram_md5 = On
    smtp_use_auth_plain = On
    smtp_use_auth_cram_md5 = On

as a bonus, rainloop supports STARTTLS and authentication for imap & smtp, even when talking to 127.0.0.1

Thunderbird

K9