Need to authenticate Outlook and NTLM

[Mark Foley]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 10:17:16 -0000 Stuart Henderson wrote:
>
> On 2019-02-13, Mark Foley via dovecot <dovecot at dovecot.org> wrote:
> > Is it possible that no one on this list is authenticating Outlook with Dovecot and NTLM?
>
> Yes, it's possible, the outdated instructions you found on the wiki
> suggests it's an uncommon configiration.

Hmmm, really? And yet Windows/Outlook is still the predominant email client out there
(unfortunately). Maybe everyone is going to outlook.com?

> No actual answers from me, but it might give you some clues:
>
> > More on this ...
> >
> > I short-sheeted ntlm_auth to see what was being passed to it. It is getting as arg1:
> >
> > --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp
> >
> > I tried running ntlm_auth at the command line as:
> >
> > ntlm_auth --username=user --password=password --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp
> >
> > It did nothing, just hung there. The ntlm_auth man page says:
> >
> > --helper-protocol=PROTO
> >   Operate as a stdio-based helper. Valid helper protocols are:
>
> The squid auth helpers are stdio-based, they run in a loop, reading from
> stdin, checking authentication, and return results on stdout. This avoids both
> passing sensitive data on the command line (visible to ps, at least briefly)
> and the need to keep forking and initialising a new process.
>
> So it's normal that it would just sit waiting for input.
>
> Dovecot is just reusing the same protocol that squid uses.

If --username and --password are passed on the command line, what is it waiting for on stdin?
Normally, ntlm_auth, with id and pw passed on the command line prints, "NT_STATUS_OK: The
operation completed successfully. (0x0)" to stdout. There is no further stdin input needed.

Is there a way to disable the --helper-protocol in Dovecot? 

>
> > After more searching I came across this post, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774263
> > which, in summary, said that ntlm_auth had to run as root. So, I added the following to my
> > dovecot config per that post's suggestion:
> >
> > service auth {
> >   user = root
> > }
> >
> > After restarting and trying again to connect from Outlook I got the message:
> >
> > auth: Info: ntlm(?,192.168.0.58,<SCINjFqBKcXAqAA6>): user not authenticated: NT_STATUS_NO_MEMORY
>
> I don't know the full details of how samba/ntlm works, but this seems like
> an error coming from the server you're attempting to authenticate against.
> I think you should start debugging on the samba side - make sure tools
> like wbinfo are working, if not then debug those with samba, then move
> on to Dovecot after you have that working.

Samba has been running for years (with updates) and everything like wbinfo works.  Dovecot can
authenticate with kerberos/GSSAPI, and other applications can authenticate with ntlm_auth.  My
suspicion here is that the "user not authenticated" problem is perhaps because dovecot cannot
run the auth service as root? The dovecot user is dovenull, so why would it be permitted to run
as root in any case?

I think the problem is in invoking ntlm_auth. I tried simply returning zero from my "fake"
ntlm_auth, but that didn't work. Not sure what Dovecot is expecting from ntlm_auth_helper.

--Mark