[Dovecot] diacritic marks in password

[Hugo Monteiro]

On 06/22/2011 06:39 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 20:05 +0100, pch0317 wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have dovecot 2.0.beta6 (on RedHat 6) and my user uses thunderbird
>> 3.1.10 (on Windows XP).
>> I use authentication via LDAP (Windows server 2003 AD).
> With auth_bind=yes?
>
>> When user use in password diacritic marks (ą,ć,ę,ł,ń,ó) authentication
>> failed.
>>
>> What can I do?
> Not much from Dovecot's side, I'm afraid.
>
>
>

Hello,

I've stumbled across such a limitation myself, but i was using OpenLDAP 
as ldap backend. I could even bind as the user, with ldapsearch, on the 
command line.
Password data is stored in ldap as a base64 encoded utf-8 string. The 
problem is that there is a long lasting bug in thunderbird that makes TB 
_always_ use iso-8859-1 to enconde passwords, making them different from 
what the ldap backend is expecting.
There was once someone that even provided the mozilla team with a patch, 
but sadly they went on without applying it. Time went by and now, even 
wanting to do the patching, the code changed so much that there would 
have to be done a major code rewrite of the patch.
You can find out about all this in this bug report thread.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312593

In our case, we solved the problem by not allowing users to use 
diacritics in passwords.

R's,

Hugo Monteiro.

-- 
fct.unl.pt:~# cat .signature

Hugo Monteiro
Email	 : hugo.monteiro at fct.unl.pt
Telefone : +351 212948300 Ext.15307
Web      : http://hmonteiro.net

Divisão de Informática
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da
		   Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Quinta da Torre   2829-516 Caparica   Portugal
Telefone: +351 212948596   Fax: +351 212948548
www.fct.unl.pt                apoio at fct.unl.pt

fct.unl.pt:~# _