Cisco ESA/WSA | Group Membership Queries for Authenticating Administrative Users

You can associate LDAP groups with user roles for accessing the appliance.

AsyncOS also uses a query to determine if a user is a member of a directory group and a separate query to find all members of a group. Membership in a directory group membership determines the user’s permissions within the system. When you enable external authentication on the Management Appliance > System Administration > Users page in the GUI (or userconfig in the CLI), you assign user roles to the groups in your LDAP directory. User roles determine the permissions that users have in the system, and for externally authenticated users, the roles are assigned to directory groups instead of individual users. For example, you can assign users in the IT directory group the Administrator role and users in the Support directory group to the Help Desk User role.

If a user belongs to multiple LDAP groups with different user roles, AsyncOS grants the user the permissions for the most restrictive role. For example, if a user belongs to a group with Operator permissions and a group with Help Desk User permissions, AsyncOS grants the user the permissions for the Help Desk User role.

When you configure the LDAP profile to query for group membership, enter the base DN for the directory level where group records can be found, the attribute that holds the group member’s user name, and the attribute that contains the group name. Based on the server type that you select for your LDAP server profile, AsyncOS enters default values for the user name and group name attributes, as well default query strings.

Note For Active Directory servers, the default query string to determine if a user is a member of a group is (&(objectClass=group)(member={u})). However, if your LDAP schema uses distinguished names in the “memberof” list instead of user names, you can use {dn} instead of {u}.

Table 11-7 shows the default query strings and attributes that AsyncOS uses when it searches for group membership information on an Active Directory server.

Table 11-7 Default Query String and Attributes for Active Directory Server

Query String	Active Directory
Base DN	[blank] (You need to use a specific base DN to find the group records.)
Query string to determine if a user is a member of a group	(&(objectClass=group)(member={u}))Note If your LDAP schema uses distinguished names in the member of list instead of user names, you can replace {u} with {dn}
Query string to determine all members of a group	(&(objectClass=group)(cn={g}))
Attribute that holds each member’s user name (or a DN for the user’s record)	member
Attribute that contains the group name	cn

Table 11-8 shows the default query strings and attributes that AsyncOS uses when it searches for group membership information on an OpenLDAP server.

Table 11-8 Default Query String and Attributes for Open LDAP Server

Query String	OpenLDAP
Base DN	[blank] (You need to use a specific base DN to find the group records.)
Query string to determine if a user is a member of a group	(&(objectClass=posixGroup)(memberUid={u}))
Query string to determine all members of a group	(&(objectClass=posixGroup)(cn={g}))
Attribute that holds each member’s user name (or a DN for the user’s record)	memberUid
Attribute that contains the group name