Lost Admin Rights using JIRA with Crowd

Question

I'm using JIRA (v6.2#6252-sha1:aa34325), everything has been working perfectly except that when I just tried to authenticate as admin I keep getting a message "The password you entered is incorrect."  It's integrated with CROWD and I have the group of jira-administrators assigned to my user.  This was working for months but now I can no longer login as admin.  Here is the output from the atlassian-jira-security.log, as you can see it passes authentication when logging in, but fails with the same user attempting to elevate to admin.

2014-09-20 22:13:54,308 http-bio-8380-exec-9 USER 1333x226x1 mzhk7k x.x.x.x,127.0.0.1 / The user 'USER' has PASSED authentication.

2014-09-20 22:14:23,760 http-bio-8380-exec-9 USER 1334x258x1 mzhk7k x.x.x.x127.0.0.1 /secure/admin/WebSudoAuthenticate.jspa The user 'USER' has FAILED authentication.  Failure count equals 1

I've found this in the crowd logs:

2014-09-20 22:55:23,872 http-bio-8095-exec-19 INFO [plugin.rest.filter.BasicApplicationAuthenticationFilter] Invalid authentication for application with name 'jira'

This only occurs when attempting to elevate the privileges to administrator, user login works fine.  The settings in crowd.properties are correct.

Any thoughts?

William Crighton _CCC_ · Answer

This has bit me before but I didn't bother tracking down what was wrong with my password, just limited the 'special characters' to those most command line parsers accept. Thanks!

lane.maxwell · Answer

Here's an update on this.  I had a special character '@' in my application.password.  I removed this and it is now working as expected.  Interestingly enough, the user authentication worked fine with this, but when attempting to elevate privs I would experiencing the issue.

I have SSO enabled via  com.atlassian.jira.security.login.SSOSeraphAuthenticator.

So, I suspect there is a bug in this particular use case.  To reproduce, use crowd with SSO enabled in Jira, with the @ sign at the end of your application.password attribute.  Sign in to JIRA with a user who has the group jira-administrators assigned to them in Crowd, and attempt to elevate to administrator.