ldapauthenticator

Simple LDAP Authenticator Plugin for JupyterHub

Installation

You can install it from pip with:

pip install jupyterhub-ldapauthenticator

...or using conda with:

conda install -c conda-forge jupyterhub-ldapauthenticator

Logging people out

If you make any changes to JupyterHub's authentication setup that changes which group of users is allowed to login (such as changing allowed_groups or even just turning on LDAPAuthenticator), you must change the jupyterhub cookie secret, or users who were previously logged in and did not log out would continue to be able to log in!

You can do this by deleting the jupyterhub_cookie_secret file. Note that this will log out all users who are currently logged in.

Usage

You can enable this authenticator with the following lines in your jupyter_config.py:

c.JupyterHub.authenticator_class = 'ldapauthenticator.LDAPAuthenticator'

Required configuration

At minimum, the following two configuration options must be set before the LDAP Authenticator can be used:

LDAPAuthenticator.server_address

Address of the LDAP Server to contact. Just use a bare hostname or IP, without a port name or protocol prefix.

LDAPAuthenticator.bind_dn_template

Template used to generate the full dn for a user from the human readable username. This must be set to either empty [] or to a list of templates the users belong to. For example, if some of the users in your LDAP database have DN of the form uid=Yuvipanda,ou=people,dc=wikimedia,dc=org and some other users have DN like uid=Mike,ou=developers,dc=wikimedia,dc=org where Yuvipanda and Mike are the usernames, you would set this config item to be:

c.LDAPAuthenticator.bind_dn_template = [
    "uid={username},ou=people,dc=wikimedia,dc=org",
    "uid={username},ou=developers,dc=wikimedia,dc=org",
]

Don't forget the preceeding c. for setting configuration parameters! JupyterHub uses traitlets for configuration, and the c represents the config object.

The {username} is expanded into the username the user provides.

Optional configuration

LDAPAuthenticator.allowed_groups

LDAP groups whose members are allowed to log in. This must be set to either empty [] (the default, to disable) or to a list of full DNs that have a member attribute that includes the current user attempting to log in.

As an example, to restrict access only to people in groups researcher or operations,

c.LDAPAuthenticator.allowed_groups = [
    "cn=researcher,ou=groups,dc=wikimedia,dc=org",
    "cn=operations,ou=groups,dc=wikimedia,dc=org",
]

LDAPAuthenticator.valid_username_regex

All usernames will be checked against this before being sent to LDAP. This acts as both an easy way to filter out invalid usernames as well as protection against LDAP injection attacks.

By default it looks for the regex ^[a-z][.a-z0-9_-]*$ which is what most shell username validators do.

LDAPAuthenticator.use_ssl

Boolean to specify whether to use SSL encryption when contacting the LDAP server. If it is left to False (the default) LDAPAuthenticator will try to upgrade connection with StartTLS. Set this to be True to start SSL connection.

LDAPAuthenticator.server_port

Port to use to contact the LDAP server. Defaults to 389 if no SSL is being used, and 636 is SSL is being used.

LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn

Whether to try a reverse lookup to obtain the user's DN. Some LDAP servers, such as Active Directory, don't always bind with the true DN, so this allows us to discover it based on the username.

c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn = True

LDAPAuthenticator.user_search_base

Only used with lookup_dn=True. Defines the search base for looking up users in the directory.

c.LDAPAuthenticator.user_search_base = 'ou=People,dc=example,dc=com'

LDAPAuthenticator.user_attribute

Only used with lookup_dn=True. Defines the attribute that stores a user's username in your directory.

# Active Directory
c.LDAPAuthenticator.user_attribute = 'sAMAccountName'

# OpenLDAP
c.LDAPAuthenticator.user_attribute = 'uid'

LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_filter

How to query LDAP for user name lookup, if lookup_dn is set to True. Default value '({login_attr}={login})' should be good enough for most use cases.

LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_user, LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_password

Technical account for user lookup, if lookup_dn is set to True. If both lookup_dn_search_user and lookup_dn_search_password are None, then anonymous LDAP query will be done.

LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_user_dn_attribute

Attribute containing user's name needed for building DN string, if lookup_dn is set to True. See user_search_base for info on how this attribute is used. For most LDAP servers, this is username. For Active Directory, it is cn.

LDAPAuthenticator.escape_userdn

If set to True, escape special chars in userdn when authenticating in LDAP. On some LDAP servers, when userdn contains chars like '(', ')', '' authentication may fail when those chars are not escaped.

LDAPAuthenticator.use_lookup_dn_username

If set to True (the default) the username used to build the DN string is returned as the username when lookup_dn is True.

When authenticating on a Linux machine against an AD server this might return something different from the supplied UNIX username. In this case setting this option to False might be a solution.

Compatibility

This has been tested against an OpenLDAP server, with the client running Python 3.4. Verifications of this code working well with other LDAP setups are welcome, as are bug reports and patches to make it work with other LDAP setups!

Active Directory integration

Please use following options for AD integration. This is useful especially in two cases:

• LDAP Search requires valid user account in order to query user database
• DN does not contain login but some other field, like CN (actual login is present in sAMAccountName, and we need to lookup CN)

c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn = True
c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_filter = '({login_attr}={login})'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_user = 'ldap_search_user_technical_account'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_search_password = 'secret'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.user_search_base = 'ou=people,dc=wikimedia,dc=org'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.user_attribute = 'sAMAccountName'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.lookup_dn_user_dn_attribute = 'cn'
c.LDAPAuthenticator.escape_userdn = False

In setup above, first LDAP will be searched (with account ldap_search_user_technical_account) for users that have sAMAccountName=login Then DN will be constructed using found CN value.

Configuration note on local user creation

Currently, local user creation by the LDAPAuthenticator is unsupported as this is insecure since there's no cleanup method for these created users. As a result, users who are disabled in LDAP will have access to this for far longer.

Alternatively, there's good support in Linux for integrating LDAP into the system user setup directly, and users can just use PAM (which is supported in not just JupyterHub, but ssh and a lot of other tools) to log in. You can see http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/archived/LDAP-Implementation-HOWTO/pamnss.html and lots of other documentation on the web on how to set up LDAP to provide user accounts for your system. Those methods are very widely used, much more secure and more widely documented. We recommend you use them rather than have JupyterHub create local accounts using the LDAPAuthenticator.

Issue #19 provides additional discussion on local user creation.