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Disable Basic Authentication

What is Basic Authentication?

User-supplied username and password are joined and separated by a colon and base64 encoded.
The base64 encoded value is sent as an HTTP header named "Authorization".
For example, if the user enters "admin" as the user name and "P@ssw0rd" as the password, the base64 encoded value would be "YWRtaW46UEBzc3cwcmQ"
The HTTP header would be like the below :
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46UEBzc3cwcmQ

Basic/Legacy/Protocols/Authentication???? :-$

Sometimes, It gets very confusing when terms like "basic" and "legacy" are used for both protocols and auth.
Therefore, It is very important to understand the difference between the messaging protocols vs the authentication mechanism.
The authentication mechanism is a part of messaging protocol which also deals with how the messages would be exchanged between the client and the server after authentication.

Let's look at the IMAP4 protocol.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501

You see the "Authenticated" step which means how clients would authenticate to the server and also the "Selected" step has the SELECT command selects a mailbox so that messages in the mailbox can be accessed.

That "Authenticated" step may make use of Basic authentication (like we described above).
However, that option of using basic auth should be disabled so clients (potential attackers) cant make use of the same.

Why basic auth is discouraged?

Since the authentication is possible by simply sending the base64 encoded user name and password, It is more prone to brute force and password spraying attacks.
It's possible to send the creds over basic auth over HTTP in which case It may be captured by an attacker and decoded back to original plain text credentials.

We create an authentication policy that has by default basic auth disabled for all protocols.
And then set the default authentication policy for the whole organization the newly created authentication policy

New-AuthenticationPolicy -Name "Block Legacy Auth for all protocols"

By default, the basic auth is disabled for all protocols.

Setting the newly created policy with basic auth disabled as the default policy for the organization/tenant.

Set-OrganizationConfig -DefaultAuthenticationPolicy "Block Legacy Auth for all protocols"

Check the newly created authentication policy :

The default authentication policy is set to the newly created authentication policy.

Get-OrganizationConfig | select DefaultAuthenticationPolicy

We can also check the Microsoft Admin Center.
Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center
Settings > Org Settings > Modern Authentication
All the settings except the "Turn on modern authentication for Outlook 2013 for Windows and later (recommended)" should be unchecked.

Enable Modern Authentication

Set-OrganizationConfig -OAuth2ClientProfileEnabled $true


Tests

The Python Script

To test the basic authentication, we will make use of the below script which tries to authenticate to Exchange Online with a given set of users using Exchange Web Services (EWS).
EWS uses Autodiscover protocol which in turn could use basic authentication.

The script can be found here as well:
https://github.com/ashishmgupta/pyAbuseLegacyAuthInEXO

from exchangelib import Credentials, Account
import requests
import os
from pathlib import Path
import re

external_ip = requests.get('https://ident.me').text
print(external_ip)
current_dir = os.getcwd()
creds_file = os.path.join(current_dir, "creds.txt")
if not os.path.isfile(creds_file):
    fp = open('creds_file', 'x')
    fp.close()
    print("Credentials file did not exist. We created a new one. Please populate with username and password separated by || in each line")
    quit()

with open(creds_file) as f:
    lines = f.readlines()

for line in lines:
    line = line.rstrip()
    cred = line.split("||")
    username = cred[0]
    password = cred[1]
    print(username)
    print(password)
    credentials = Credentials(username, password)
    account = Account(username, credentials=credentials, autodiscover=True)

    user_folder= current_dir+"/"+username
    Path(user_folder).mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

    for msg in account.inbox.all().order_by('-datetime_received')[:10]:
        email_content=""
        clean_subject = re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9]+','', msg.subject )
        msg_folder_to_save =  user_folder +"/"+clean_subject
        msg_contents_file =  msg_folder_to_save +"/msg.txt"
        Path(msg_folder_to_save).mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
        #print(msg.subject, msg.sender, msg.datetime_received)

        email_content += "sender            ={}".format(msg.sender) + "\n"
        email_content += "datetime_sent     ={}".format(msg.datetime_sent)+ "\n"
        email_content += "subject           ={}".format(msg.subject)+ "\n"
        email_content += "text_body         ={}".format(msg.text_body.encode('UTF-8'))+ "\n"
        with open(msg_contents_file, "w+") as f:
            f.write(email_content)

        print(email_content)
        print("#" * 80)
        for attachment in msg.attachments:
            fpath = os.path.join(msg_folder_to_save, attachment.name)
            with open(fpath, 'wb') as f:
                f.write(attachment.content)

Enabling the basic auth for all protocols

Set-AuthenticationPolicy -Identity 'Block Legacy Auth for all protocols' -AllowBasicAuthAutodiscover -AllowBasicAuthActiveSync -AllowBasicAuthImap -AllowBasicAuthMapi -AllowBasicAuthOfflineAddressBook -AllowBasicAuthOutlookService -AllowBasicAuthPop -AllowBasicAuthPowershell -AllowBasicAuthReportingWebServices -AllowBasicAuthRpc -AllowBasicAuthSmtp -AllowBasicAuthWebServices


Basic auth enabled for all protocols.


Executing the Python script. Could retrieve all the messages from the mailbox.

Disabling the basic auth for all protocols

Set-AuthenticationPolicy -Identity 'Block Legacy Auth for all protocols' -AllowBasicAuthAutodiscover:$false -AllowBasicAuthActiveSync:$false -AllowBasicAuthImap:$false -AllowBasicAuthMapi:$false -AllowBasicAuthOfflineAddressBook:$false -AllowBasicAuthOutlookService:$false -AllowBasicAuthPop:$false -AllowBasicAuthPowershell:$false -AllowBasicAuthReportingWebServices:$false -AllowBasicAuthRpc:$false -AllowBasicAuthSmtp:$false -AllowBasicAuthWebServices:$false 


Basic auth disabled for all protocols.

The test will fail with below error :

exchangelib.errors.AutoDiscoverFailed: All steps in the autodiscover protocol failed for email 'email'. If you think this is an error, consider doing an official test at https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com