Application-Specific-Passwords-for-Dovecot-and-Postfix

Published on Sunday, December 2, 2012

This is the first part of a series I will be doing on how I implemented one-time password support for remote access to resources inside my home network such as my webmail client, along with supporting application and device specific passwords for use on my mobile phone, tablet, etc.

I always hate the feeling of using any of my username and password combinations on sketchy public computer somewhere. You know the kind I am talking about, those computers at hotels running Windows XP and IE6, signed as "Adminstrator", with every toolbar and add-on installed from a 9 year old version of Real Player to three different versions of some Internet poker game. There's bound to be a key logger in there someplace.

One time use passwords have been around for a long time to mitigate this type of scenario. As the name suggests a one-time password, is valid only once. In theory if someone sees or captures that password, it's worthless to them. Typically one time passwords are accompanied by a normal password, or a PIN number. This mostly satisfies Two Factor Authentication, which requires something you know (the password or PIN), and something you have (the phone giving you the password). Google started offering one-time-password support for Google accounts through the 2-step verification system and the Authenticator app.

So we have three different surfaces to protect:

  • Apache HTTP access to the Roundcube webmail client.
  • Postfix SMTP access to send mail from an external e-mail.
  • Dovecot IMAP access to retrieve mail from an external e-mail client.

We want to be able to use our one-time password to access #1, but since an e-mail client may login many times during a single session, #2 and #3 are better served by an application specific password that is sufficiently random but never changes.

So I set out by sketching out a few requirements:

  1. Make use of my existing e-mail platform (Ubuntu 12.04 + Postfix + Dovecot + RoundCube on Apache).
  2. Close any existing access points into home network via simple username/password combinations.
  3. Support application/device specific passwords for IMAP and SMTP clients (thunderbird, etc.).
  4. Support one-time passwords to access RoundCube webmail.
  5. Phone app to generate one-time passwords.
  6. Backup codes that can be printed to use in the case where the app is not inaccessible.

Application Specific Passwords

Since the first step is to prevent logins to IMAP and SMTP from outside the firewall with passwords we may be typing in on public computer, we need to provide secure passwords that will only be entered once into a device or application to configure. We don’t need to remember these passwords, so we can revoke them and re-configure an application or device at anytime.

Dovecot is configured to authenticate users against PAM, and PAM is configured to authenticate users with mod-auth-kerb. Postfix is configured to authenticate via SASL to Dovecot. So ultimately, there is a single username/password for all users through my Kerberos database.

Dovecot separates the concept of a user database and password database, so I can keep my existing user database (Linux passwd, LDAP, etc), and just alter the password database. To add additional password validation options to Dovecot, you simply add more passdb options to the configuration file. One of those options happens to be a MySQL, so I went ahead and made a simple database and table to store our application specific passwords.

CREATE TABLE \`dovecot\_passwords\` (
  \`username\` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  \`appname\` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  \`password\` varbinary(256) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (\`username\`,\`appname\`)
)

You will notice username and appname make the unique key here, since we want to have multiple passwords for the same account. The data in this table might look something like this:

username appname password
justin K9 Mail on Phone ******
justin Thunderbird on Desktop ******
sarah iPhone ******

The value in the password field is the MD5 hash of the password without any whitespace (Yes, it should be salted and maybe using SHA1 instead). In order to make the application specific passwords more secure, I’m using rather long passwords, and so when I generate them I usually format them in blocks of four separated by spaces, such as xRtg Dbea 4d9g aP44. This is easier to type into a mobile keyboard while glancing back and forth between the device and the keyboard. The password database will need to ignore the whitespace, because we don’t care either way if it is there. For now I'll just manage entries in this table manually, but later I plan on writing a fancy CLI or GUI tool. So to insert new records in this table, I generate a random password, and do an insert:

INSERT INTO dovecot\_passwords (username, appname, password) VALUES( 'justin', 'smartphone', MD5('xRtgDbea4d9gaP44') );

Now I can configure Dovecot to check this password database instead of PAM by changing my passdb entry to use the SQL driver instead of PAM.

#/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
passdb { 
    args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql-other.conf 
    driver = sql 
}

And the associated SQL config file:

#/etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql-other.conf 
driver = mysql 
connect = host=localhost dbname=mail\_db user=dovecot password=\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* 
default\_pass\_scheme = PLAIN 
password\_query = SELECT NULL AS password,'Y' as nopassword, username AS user 
                FROM dovecot\_passwords
                WHERE username = '%u' AND password=MD5(REPLACE('%w',' ',''))

You can read more about how this configuration file works on the Dovecot Wiki page for SQL passdb, but essentially my query is removing any whitespace from the supplied password, and matching the MD5 hash. To really make this secure, we should be adding a password salt into the mix and probably using SHA1 for the hash algorithm. It is worth mentioning, that if you want to support regular username/password authentication via PAM for users on the internal network, but the application specific passwords everywhere else, this is possible by adding the pam_access module into your PAM configuration for Dovecot.

So now we have satisfied requirements #1, #2, and #3. Dovecot (and Postfix by means of SASL) will now authenticate users against the custom password database, and will not authenticate users with their old username/password.

Next up: Implementing #4, #5, #6 to support One-time passwords.