Safeguard Authentication Services provides the ability to authenticate an Active Directory user to a Unix system even when Active Directory is unavailable. For example, because Safeguard Authentication Services supports disconnected authentication, you can still log into your laptop when you are traveling and your laptop does not have connectivity to Active Directory.
Safeguard Authentication Services supports several options for disconnected authentication. Two types of disconnected authentication modes are the default disconnected authentication mode and permanent-disconnected authentication mode.
Default disconnected authentication mode
By default, Safeguard Authentication Services relies on a previous successful authentication attempt when the computer was not in disconnected mode. The successful authentication caches a sha256 hash of the user’s password. Safeguard Authentication Services uses this hash to validate the user’s password when it is in disconnected mode for one of the following reasons:
- The computer is physically disconnected from the network or the network is down.
- The computer object has been deleted.
Note: If the host's computer object has been deleted, then Safeguard Authentication Services can no longer authenticate with Active Directory. The solution to this problem is to recreate the computer object, then restart vasd.
- The host keytab file (/etc/opt/quest/vas/host.keytab) is missing or invalid.
Note: If the host keytab is deleted or becomes corrupt, then Safeguard Authentication Services can no longer authenticate with Active Directory. The solution to this problem is to delete then recreate the computer object and restart vasd.
- The Active Directory server is down or object unreachable.
You can disable the default disconnected authentication mode by setting allow-disconnected-auth to false in the vas.conf. See the vas.conf man page for more details.
Permanent-disconnected authentication mode
There are situations where a Unix system administrator may be responsible for a large number of Unix systems. In the default mode, you need to log in to every Unix system at least once to be able to log in to the systems in a disconnected state. In a large environment with hundreds or thousands of Unix systems, this requirement would be impractical. Safeguard Authentication Services has added a feature called Permanent-disconnected authentication mode. This mode does not require a previously successful authentication, that is, users or group of users can log into a Unix system in a disconnected state even if they had never logged into the Unix system in the past.
Before you configure permanent-disconnected authentication mode in the vas.conf file, you must first set the service principal name (SPN) for each user who will authenticate using this mode. You can set the SPN by using a tool like the Microsoft Active Directory Service Interfaces Editor (ADSI Edit), or by issuing a vastool command such as the following:
vastool <username> setattrs - u <username> servicePrincipalName "user/<username>@<DomainName>"
Note: The content of the service principal name is unimportant; it just needs to conform to the format of servicePrincipalName.
Configure the permanent-disconnected authentication mode in addition to the default disconnected authentication mode on a per user or group basis by specifying perm-disconnected-users in the vas.conf. See the vas.conf man page for more details. These perm-disconnected-users have encrypted credentials pre-cached when the Safeguard Authentication Services caching daemon starts the first time (immediately upon join if the users are configured as perm-disconnected-users by means of group policy). Typically you configure permanent-disconnected authentication mode to ensure that a certain group of system administrators can access a system, even if the first time they attempt access it is disconnected from the network.
Safeguard Authentication Services continues to operate normally in disconnected mode; thus, it may be difficult to know whether Safeguard Authentication Services is in disconnected mode. Safeguard Authentication Services creates log entries in the system log each time the connection mode changes.