Plain Text Passwords in Unicode?

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 07:43:15PM -0400, Michael B Allen wrote:
> Usually negotiating plaintext passwords and Unicode are mutually exclusive
> so I'm not sure what the right behavior is but apparently Samba (3.0.14a
> at least) doesn't like the plaintext password in Unicode. Is that the
> right bahavior? I cannot easily modify the security policy on my XP
> workstation so theres no way to check at the moment.
> 
> Anyone know off-hand if the plaintext password should be "ASCII" even if
> Unicode is negotiated?

I responded to the original posting on the jCIFS list.  I cover this (a 
bit) in my book.

The answer is that Windows doesn't have settings (as far as I can tell)  
that permit the combination of plaintext and Unicode.  Neither in client
mode nor in server mode.

Samba, however, does.

You can use smbclient to do a plaintext Unicode login to a Samba server,
if both are configured the same way.  There are some quirks, though.  The
formatting of the strings doesn't always make sense.  I have some captures
somewhere...

My guess is that support for plaintext Unicode passwords in Samba was a
bit of an accident.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org