FoxT BoKS: forcing a user to change his password

2009-11-18 07:19:00

Sometimes I think too far out of the box :)

I have always been up front about what I think about FoxT's BoKS security software: it's good stuff, but sometimes it's a bit kludgy. Today I learned that I shouldn't let this cloud my judgment too much because sometimes BoKS -does- do things elegantly ^_^;

A colleague of mine asked me the following question: Is it possible to force a user to change his password on the next login, -without- using the web interface?.

Seems straightforward enough, right? However, in my clouded mindset I completely over thought the whole matter and started digging in the database. Table 1 of the BoKS database should contain the relevant information, but which field could it be? Two fields seem to stand out, but neither is related.

BoKS > dumpbase -t1 | grep ru13rs

RLOGNAME="SECURITY:thomas" UID="1000" GID="1000" PROFILE="SecuritySupport" REALNAME="Thomas Sluyter" HOMEDIR="thomas" USERLASTCHANGE="1224244960" FLAGS="16384" PSW="39ajnasdlfkj4" PSWLASTCHANGE="1256545622" NO_PWDF="0" SERIAL="" PSWKEY="6436" LASTTTY="servera:pts/17" LASTLOGIN="1258524725" LASTLOGOUT="1258465492" RETRY="0" RESERVED1="125196" RESERVED2="" LOGINVALIDTIME="0" PSWVALIDTIME="0" CHPSWTIME="0" PSWMINLEN="0" PSWFORCE="0" PSWHISTLEN="0" CHPSWFREQ="0" TIMEOUT="0" TTIMEOUT="0" TDAYS="0" TSTART="0" TEND="0" RETRYMAX="0" CONCUR_LOGINS="0" SHELL="/bin/ksh" PARAMETERMASK="16384" PSDPSW="" PSDPSWLASTCHANGE="0" PSDPSWRETRIES="0" PSDBLOCKED="0" PSDBLOCKEDTIME="0" FEK="" GEKVER="" MD5DN="" LASTDTLOGIN="0" SETTINGVER=""

I've no clue what the NO_PWDF field does, but at least it does NOT stand for "no password force" :) Also, the field PSWFORCE does indeed have something to do with the enforcing of passwords, but not with the forced changing thereof. Instead it defines which guidelines and rules a new password must adhere to (see page 262 of the BoKS 6.5 admin guide). In the end our friendly FoxT support engineer informed me that the value I was looking for is a hex code that's part of the FLAGS field.

However, that's not why I over thought things.

In his email the engineer also showed how he derived the appropriate hex value from the FLAGS field, which led to:

BoKS > man passwd

-f This option forces the user to enter a new password on the next login. Valid for superuser only.

Duh!

EDIT:

Obviously you can also use modbks -l $USER -L $DAYS to set the PSWLASTCHANGE field for the user back X amount of days past the PSWVALIDTIME. However, this isn't very practical since the PSWVALIDTIME field differs per user :)

You'd also be messing with information that could be important to a SOx audit, so you'd better not do it this way ;)

kilala.nl tags: boks, sysadmin,

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