[Mageia-sysadm] [LONG] sympa ( and web apps ) ldap authentication

[nicolas vigier]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2010, Michael Scherer wrote:

> > > - using email as login is dangerous. Since the email is freely editable
> > > in catdap ( and multivalued ), someone could perfectly change his email
> > > after opening a account, and thus get access to sympa subscription of
> > > someone else.
> > 
> > And lose their account to the user whose email address was used as soon as we 
> > allow user-initiated password reset ...
> 
> Which is not a problem, since opening a account is free. If we start to
> have some private mls ( such as the one requested for forums ), reading
> archive would be a privacy issue, and so step must be taken to prevent
> that.
> 
> But my main point is not this particular example who is quite easy to
> prevent. But rather that letting people freely edit the attribute they
> use for login is IMHO a risky operation given the wide range of
> application that we will have.
> 
> Editing by admin should be ok. 

To avoid this, I think email should not be freely editable in catdat,
but should be verified first before being actually changed in ldap.
When changing email, the user should receive on the new email an URL
to open to confirm he is the owner of the email.