JIRA + Crowd + Active Directory - No AD Users can log in.

[Chris Twilleager]

I am unable to authenticate Active Directory users in JIRA via Crowd SSO. Even though I'm entering a valid username and password, JIRA login wrongly reports "Sorry, your username and password are incorrect - please try again." The atlassian-jira-security.log file shows the following unhelpful error:

"2016-11-10 00:16:56,761 http-nio-8080-exec-5 anonymous 16x610x1 1rpz5pw 172.18.1.24,127.0.0.1 /login.jsp login : 'username' tried to login but they do not have USE permission or weren't found. Deleting remember me cookie."

Again, my username and password is correct. In Crowd, I am able to log in with the exact same user account. Moreover, in Crowd's Application Authentication Test, my valid username and password are successful. JIRA simply won't let any Active Directory LDAP user log in. If I configure an Internal directory in Crowd and specify an internal user, I can log into JIRA, but I don't want to use internal directories or  internal users not in Active Directory. All users for the Atlassian software must be Active Directory users.

Note that because our configuration requires the use of SSL, I have parked JIRA and Crowd behind nginx with SSL enabled and valid certificates issued. 

[Chris Twilleager · Accepted solution]

Well it's fixed now, though I did take the "atomic approach". I destroyed everything and started over from scratch. The majority of the core system deployments are automated, so it doesn't take long to set up.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's a few things that might be wrong here.

>JIRA login wrongly reports "Sorry, your username and password are incorrect - please try again.

This is quite a subtle use of language, and although it seems clear, it is not, but with good reason.  You may well have entered a username and password combination that you think is correct because it is in LDAP.  But if those LDAP details are not reaching JIRA, then the message is right - it can't let you in because the combination is incorrect.  "Incorrect" is obscuring the difference between "wrong" and "not there".  Because if you told an attacker the difference, you'd have handed them a username or password on a plate and made it a lot easier for them.

You've done the right thing and read the log, which now says "username doesn't have permission, or isn't there".

Then you've tested Crowd, which is the next right thing to do, and that passes authentication, which means Crowd recognises you.  But that isn't getting to JIRA.

So, there's a few things to check.  Personally, I'd start with the directory settings in JIRA.  Test the Crowd connection from the JIRA end.  I start there because it's a few clicks and can tell you a lot about the connection.  If that works, then the next bit is where I usually get it wrong, on the Crowd side - check that the user is in the right directories, has the right application mapping and is in the application's "can log in" group named in the global permissions and/or application access (usually jira-users and/or jira-software users)