Authentication issues after >8.5.3 upgrade - SCP & vDiscovery (and possibly other services)

[#1]

We recently upgraded from 8.4.7 to 8.5.4 and have been having all sorts of authentication issues, with different services. Two of them have been resolved by changing the password, as they apparently contained special characters that became illegal in 8.5.3. Unfortunately, the release notes don't mention this change, nor does the Admin Guide...

In fact, the only place I could find it was an article on the support site - Only handful of special characters are supported as passwords for features involving SCP/FTP transfe...

For any SCP/FTP transfers from Infoblox server, only the below set of special characters are supported as passwords from NIOS-8.5.3 onwards

. - _ / ! @ ^ + % , :

This affects any feature in Infoblox which uses SCP/FTP for data transfer

I'm kinda disappointed we had to have two outages (possibly 3, depending on the outcome of API auth issues we're still working on) to discover a change in the password rules. That really should have been communicated widely, so that we could have planned for it when we were upgrading.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Laura203,

Thank you for your inquiry and feedback. In NIOS 8.5.3 and later, we removed support for some special characters in SCP/FTP passwords to fix a potential vulnerability. Normally, this update would have been mentioned in the Release Notes, but it was missed and we sincerely apologize.

We make every effort to document important updates to keep our customers informed. We initially published Knowledge Base (KB) article 000007451 to describe the new limitation, however, the KB article was removed on March 18th after it was decided that we would bring back support for the apostrophe (currently scheduled for implementation in NIOS 8.6.2).

To remedy this matter, the KB article and Release Notes have been revised and republished. We appreciate your patience and your ongoing business as we work to deliver best-in-class core network and security services.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Rose

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

NIOS DNS, DHCP, IPAM and Value-Added Services