Technical Tip: Local user, username case sensitivity and accent sensitivity

[ajoe]

Description

This article describes the option to disable username case sensitivity for all types of local users.

Scope

FortiGate.

Solution

By default, remote LDAP and RADIUS user names are case-sensitive.
When a remote user object is applied to SSL VPN authentication, the user has to type the exact case that is used in the user definition on the FortiGate.

The ' set username-case-sensitivity’ CLI command can disable case sensitivity, allowing the remote user object to match any case the end user types in while logging.

To disable case sensitivity for individual users use the following command.

config user local
    edit "<name>"
        set type <ldap|radius>
        set username-case-sensitivity disable/enable
end

• disable: Ignore case and accents. The username at the prompt is not required to match the case or accents.
• enable: Do not ignore cases and accents. The username at the prompt must be an exact match.

Note that this option will be available only from the CLI and when the user is enabled with any two-factor authentication method.

From v5.6.14, v6.0.13, v6.2.10, v6.4.7, v7.0.1 and above versions:

To match accented characters (for example: 'ě' instead of 'e'  and other few characters ščřžýáíéúů), which are present in many non-English languages, the existing option 'username-case-sensitivity' has been changed to 'username-sensitivity'.

This new option includes both case sensitivity and accent sensitivity. When disabled, both case and accents are ignored when comparing names while matching the local user.

config user local

    edit "<name>"

        set username-sensitivity ? 

        enable <---- Do not ignore cases and accents. The username at the prompt must be an exact match.

        disable <---- Ignore case and accents. The username at the prompt is not required to match the case or accent.

end

Note:

1. If the user's password is stored locally (set type password), the option to enable, or disable username-sensitivity will not be available.
2. The user case sensitivity is only available per user setting, a global configuration for case sensitivity is not available.

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