Sunday, June 2, 2013

Annoying password storage in Windows for Outlook accounts

I'm somewhat of an Information Security maverick, so I've been living the BYOD lifestyle (whilst keeping stuff secure) for the better part of 4 years.  This basically means that none of my devices are members of the corporate Active Directory Domain.

When your machine is a domain member and you login, the domain credentials are tokenised (either as NTLM tokens or Kerberos Tickets).  Any application which can make use of these - such as Outlook - just calls on the token and passes it on to the Exchange CAS servers to authenticate your session.   No need to enter your password again - Single Sign On.  Everybody's happy.

However if you're not a domain member there is no automatic creation of authentication tokens to services hosted in any AD domains, so when you launch applications which access those services you're prompted for your credentials.  No big deal - you just enter the relevant username and password and tick the "Remember my Credentials" option.  The next time you launch the application the authentication is seamless.

When you change your domain password, your applications will pop a dialog box asking you to re-enter your password because, hey, the authentication failed since the stored password is the old one.   Again you would suggest this is no big deal because you can just re-enter your password and ensure the "remember my password" option is ticked, right?

Wrong (at least for some Outlook).

For some bizarre reason, the Windows Credential store does not update the password when you enter a new one.   The login will work but the store keeps the old password and the next time you launch Outlook you get prompted for the password again.  This continues indefinitely unless you take action.

As per Microsoft's own article on this problem (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2762344), the only solution is to open the Windows Credential Manager and manually remove the stored credentials for any items with the word "Outlook" listed in them.  The next time you open Outlook and tell the popup to store the credential, the password is saved back to the credential store.

It sure would be nice if Microsoft fixed this one, because it's happening on my Windows 8 Pro machines running Office 2013, so it's not like it's something from the past.

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