84395-Wsa Authentication Methods
84395-Wsa Authentication Methods
This white paper takes a scenario-based approach to help you identify the capabilities
that you need, and it also explains how those functions work. You can then refer to the
Cisco IronPort AsyncOS® for Web User Guide 6.0 to make the required configuration
changes to enable the functions you need.
• Authentication scenarios
• Authorization scenarios
• Accounting scenarios
Authentication Protocols
This section describes the authentication protocols that are supported in the Cisco IronPort
Web Security Appliance.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for a detailed description of
LDAP configuration options.
2) WSA sends auth dialog to client 4) WSA sends credentials to LDAP server
To configure an NTLM authentication realm on the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance,
the appliance must join an Active Directory domain. If this AD domain has a trust relationship
with other AD domains, users belonging to those domains can also be authenticated. You
may specify up to three Active Directory servers for failover.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for a detailed description of
NTLM configuration options.
Authentication Scenarios
This section describes how authentication features of the Cisco IronPort Web Security
Appliance can be used in real-world scenarios.
How does the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance track user credentials?
Once the user has authenticated successfully, the Cisco IronPort Web Security
Appliance associates the transactions with the user using authentication “surrogates.”
Two authentication surrogates are supported: IP addresses and cookies. You can also
configure the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance to not use any surrogate when
authenticating users. The scenarios to choose the surrogates and the associated
functions are described below.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for information configuring
authentication surrogates.
Scenario 1: Environments that do not have an IP address for user mapping, for example,
in Citrix environments.
In both the above scenarios, tracking users with an IP address will not work well, so you
need to use cookies.
A cookie surrogate can be used as a session or a persistent cookie. Session cookies are
valid only for a particular browser session. For a new session of a browser, the cookie
becomes invalid and the client is authenticated again. Persistent cookies are valid until
they time out, and they survive browser restarts. As long as the persistent cookie is valid,
the user is not authenticated across browser sessions.
The figure below illustrates how cookie-based surrogates work in both explicit forward
mode and transparent mode (applicable to Cisco IronPort AsyncOS 6.0 and later).
Cookie-Based Surrogates
4) Proxy sends 401 auth request to client 6a) Proxy sends credentials to auth server
5) Client prompts user for credentials 6b) Auth server verifies credentials
and responds
6c) Proxy validates credentials,
generates cookies redirects variant
of URL with the cookie
8) Proxy intercepts, strips cookie tag, 12) Origin server sends resource
redirects user to correct site and sets back to client
cookie in browser
The advantage of using cookies is that authentication stays with the browser rather than the
user name or IP. Because of this, cookies are considered safer than IP address surrogates.
One disadvantage of using cookies is that they do not work for applications that do not
support cookies, such as browsers where cookies are disabled or FTP clients.
IP ADDRESS SURROGATES
Scenario 2: Organizations or customers that interact with many HTTPS websites where
cookie-based surrogates do not work.
Scenario 3: Organizations that need authentication for custom applications that do not
support cookies.
IP-Based Surrogates
1) Request for http://www.ironport.com
An advantage of IP address surrogates is that they work with HTTPS requests. Also,
IP address surrogates work with all applications, including those that do not support
cookies. A disadvantage of IP address surrogates is that the authentication remains with
the IP address and not the user. If a different user logs in on the same IP address, the user
is considered authenticated.
The web proxy does not use any surrogate to keep track of users, and it authenticates the
user for every new TCP connection. This option is available only in explicit forward mode.
The Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance uses a time-to-live (TTL) for the authentication
credentials so that the user is not prompted for the credentials again for a specified period
of time.
How can user credentials be sent securely from the client to the Web Security
Appliance?
Scenario : Organizations that do not want to send user credentials in clear text from the
client to the web proxy, since this can be perceived as a security hole.
When a client makes a connection to the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance and sends
authentication credentials, the credentials are sent in clear text and can be easily captured
via packet capture. However, you can configure the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance so
that clients can send credentials securely. This is called “credential encryption” in Cisco Iron-
Port AsyncOS 6.0 and later. When credential encryption is used, IP or cookie surrogates must
be configured. Credential encryption works both in explicit forward and transparent mode.
In order to establish a secure connection between the client and the Cisco IronPort Web
Security Appliance, either a default or custom HTTPS certificate and private key are
installed in the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for more information on
configuring credential encryption.
How does the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance effectively fail over and fail
back to other authentication servers?
Scenario : When authentication is enabled and an organization’s Internet traffic is very
high, the amounts of authentication requests that are sent tend to be very high
as well. This can result in a heavy load on authentication servers, and requires
failover capabilities.
The Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance allows administrators to define and add
multiple authentication servers. In Cisco IronPort AsyncOS 6.0 and later, the Cisco IronPort
Web Security Appliance supports up to three Active Directory or LDAP servers in a single
authentication realm. This is useful for the scenario mentioned above, where an organization
can add multiple authentication servers to enable failover capability. The Cisco IronPort
Web Security Appliance connects to the authentication server that is first in the list of
servers mentioned in the realm. This ensures a low latency.
Failover is the ability to seamlessly switch to redundant servers upon failure of primarily
active servers. When an active server serving requests to a client fails or shuts down
abruptly, any subsequent requests are tried on the redundant servers one at a time until
a connection is successfully established. Once a connection is successfully established,
this server caters to all subsequent requests until another failure of the server. The user
experience is not hindered and the user is not aware that failover has occurred.
Failback is the ability to seamlessly start using the primary server once the primary
server comes back up again. To achieve this, the health-monitoring program of the
appliance periodically tests connectivity to the primary server. If the primary server is
up, the appliance fails back to the primary server.
Use the guest access feature in Cisco IronPort AsyncOS 6.0 and later to address this
scenario. The feature is enabled via the Identity page using a checkbox labeled “Support
Guest privileges for users failing authentication.” After you enable guest access in the
Identity group, you can use the guest identity to create access, routing, or decryption
policies for guests.
When a request hits an identity group that applies to guests, the user is prompted to
authenticate. If the user credentials are invalid, the user falls in a guest access policy.
You can log the guest user in the access logs by either the user name as entered by
the end user, or by the IP address. Each guest user name/IP address is prefixed
by “[Unauthenticated].”
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for information on configuring
guest access
Scenario 2: Environments where a user may have multiple roles in the organization, such
as an engineer and a manager, and the user needs different levels of access
for each role. As an engineer, when the user tries to access a resource that
needs manager privileges, the user must be prompted for re-authentication.
In Cisco IronPort AsyncOS 6.0 and later, the re-authentication feature provides a mechanism
for a user to authenticate again upon encountering a blocked page based on restrictive
URL filtering in access policies. Re-authentication is not triggered for resources blocked by
web reputation scores or malware scanning verdicts. Also, if the client is using an identity
with no authentication required, then the user is not prompted for re-authentication and is
presented with a block page.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for information on configuring
the re-authentication feature.
Group information of a user may be stored in different ways in an LDAP server. For
example, users can be grouped by group object or by user object.
Cisco IronPort AsyncOS 6.0 and later support options to fetch user group information
using either user object or group object in the LDAP server.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for information on configuring
this feature.
Authorization Scenarios
This section describes how using authorization with a Cisco IronPort Web Security
Appliance can be used to enforce acceptable use policies.
When a request is received from a client, an identity is assigned to the request based on
one or more criteria, such as subnet, ports, authentication realms, and so on. The policies
that are based on this identity determine the user’s authorization—in other words, the
privileges to access the Internet. These could be access, routing, data security, external
DLP, or decryption policies.
A policy can be defined such that users who access the Internet cannot use a specific
browser. For example, an organization may not want users to use Firefox 2.
A policy can be defined such that after authentication succeeds, certain protocols are not
allowed for the authenticated users. For example, an organization may not want to allow
certain authenticated users, such as software programmers, to use FTP.
A policy can be defined such that after authentication succeeds, the authenticated users
get access to the Internet for a certain period of time. For example, an organization may
want to allow access to shopping websites only after business hours.
Accounting Scenarios
This section describes how Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance log files can be used
for accounting purposes.
Access logs and authentication logs are used to achieve accounting of user actions.
• Access logs provide descriptive information about each user transaction. Access log
entries provide information on how the appliance handled each transaction. Information
about the authenticated user is also available in the access log. Following is an example
of an entry in the access log.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for details on access log fields.
There are five log levels that are available for access logs and authentication logs: Critical,
Warning, Information, Debug, and Trace. The default log level is Information.
In the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance monitor dashboard, reports for client web
activity can also be used for accounting. The “Top client by total web activity” bar chart
shows total transactions for a user. The “Top clients by transactions blocked” bar chart
shows the number of transactions that were blocked for a user. This gives a picture of the
user’s activity. The “Client details” table gives a summary and also details on the bandwidth
saved, high-risk transactions blocked by URL category, web reputation score, and malware.
Refer to the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS for Web User Guide for details on the Monitor page.
As Internet usage continues to increase, authentication and authorization are critical for
the enterprise to gain the desired visibility into (and apply the necessary control over) web
transactions. Managing authentication and authorization can be challenging because each
enterprise has unique environments including user directories, the way the groups are set
up, browsers, policies on cookie usage, and more. A secure web gateway should be flexible
enough to fit into diverse environments, yet able to provide granular controls based on
user identity.
As explained in this paper, the Cisco IronPort S-Series Web Security Appliance provides
authentication, authorization, and accounting capabilities that provide that flexibility—making
it an ideal choice to fit diverse enterprise needs.
If you require additional help make the required configuration changes to enable the
functions you need, please contact your Cisco Systems Engineer.
Appendix
The following section summarizes the different authentication features that are available in
the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance.
• Authentication surrogates. IP, cookie, and no surrogates. This feature can be used to
associate one or more transactions with a user. Two forms of objects are used to achieve
this association: IP addresses and cookies. See Section 7.1 for more details.
• Secure client authentication. This feature can be used to ensure that a transaction
between the client and the web proxy is secure so that user credentials are not exposed.
See Section 7.2 for more details.
• Upstream proxies. This feature highlights how authentication in the Cisco IronPort Web
Security Appliance should be set up if upstream proxies are deployed in the network. See
Section 7.3 for more details.
• Origin server authentication. This feature highlights how the Cisco IronPort Web
Security Appliance evaluates multiple authentication requests via HTTP headers. See
Section 7.4 for more details.
• Failover and failback. This feature highlights how the Cisco IronPort Web Security
Appliance handles authentication requests when authentication servers fail over and fail
back. See Section 7.5 for more details.
• Failed authentication. This feature can be used to provide minimal Internet access to
users who are not part of the organization. See Section 7.6 for more details.
• Re-authentication. This feature can be used to generate levels of authentication for URL
categories. See Section 7.7 for more details.
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