skip to main content
10.1145/3539811.3579560acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesuccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

End of Basic Authentication and Migration to Modern Authentication for Exchange Online

Published: 20 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

At Kyushu University, Information Infrastructure Initiative provides an email service named "Primary Mail Service" for students and staff members with Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online. On September 20th, 2019, Microsoft announced the end of support for Basic Authentication for Exchange Online, which is considered vulnerable to identity leakages such as phishing and malware attacks. Microsoft would require users to use Modern Authentication such as Exchange protocol or OAuth 2.0 authorization with IMAP, POP, and SMTP. Historically we had instructed our users to use IMAP or POP and SMTP protocols for their email applications, including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, so disabling Basic Authentication would significantly impact our user population. In September 2021, Microsoft announced the end of September 2022 as the hard deadline for disabling Basic Authentication. Based on available information, we prepared migration documents from Basic Authentication to Modern Authentication and started to notify users to abandon Basic Authentication. Sending messages to users did not seem to be effective after a couple of notifications, so we tried to temporarily disable Basic Authentication to realize the remaining users through authentication failures. In this paper, we would like to share our experiences about the effect of retiring Basic Authentication for Exchange Online on our service and users.

References

[1]
Dick Hardt. 2012. The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework. RFC 6749. https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6749
[2]
Michael Jones and Dick Hardt. 2012. The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework: Bearer Token Usage. RFC 6750. https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6750
[3]
Yoshiaki Kasahara, Eisuke Ito, and Naomi Fujimura. 2014. Introduction of New Kyushu University Primary Mail Service for Staff Members and Students. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA) (SIGUCCS ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 103–106. https://doi.org/10.1145/2661172.2662965
[4]
Yoshiaki Kasahara, Takao Shimayoshi, Eisuke Ito, and Naomi Fujimura. 2018. The Past, Current, and Future of Our Email Services in Kyushu University. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM on SIGUCCS Annual Conference (Orlando, Florida, USA) (SIGUCCS ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 103–106. https://doi.org/10.1145/3235715.3235737
[5]
Yoshiaki Kasahara, Takao Shimayoshi, Tadayuki Miyaguchi, and Naomi Fujimura. 2019. Migrate Legacy Email Services in Kyushu University to Exchange Online. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference (New Orleans, LA, USA) (SIGUCCS ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 127–131. https://doi.org/10.1145/3347709.3347817
[6]
Microsoft. 2019. Improving Security - Together. Retrieved September 13, 2022 from https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/improving-security-together/ba-p/805892
[7]
Microsoft. 2020. Announcing OAuth 2.0 support for IMAP and SMTP AUTH protocols in Exchange Online. Retrieved September 13, 2022 from https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/announcing-oauth-2-0-support-for-imap-and-smtp-auth-protocols-in/ba-p/1330432
[8]
Microsoft. 2020. Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – April 2020 Update. Retrieved September 15, 2022 from https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-and-exchange-online-april-2020-update/ba-p/1275508
[9]
Microsoft. 2020. Basic Authentication Deprecation in Exchange Online – September 2022 Update. Retrieved September 15, 2022 from https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-deprecation-in-exchange-online-september/ba-p/3609437
[10]
Microsoft. 2022. Azure AD Conditional Access documentation. Retrieved September 16, 2022 from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/conditional-access/
[11]
Microsoft. 2022. Limits for automated, scheduled, and instant flows. Retrieved September 16, 2022 from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config
[12]
Microsoft. 2022. Microsoft Graph throttling guidance. Retrieved September 16, 2022 from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling
[13]
Microsoft. 2022. What is Identity Protection?Retrieved September 16, 2022 from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/identity-protection/overview-identity-protection
[14]
William Mills, Tim Showalter, and Hannes Tschofenig. 2015. A Set of Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) Mechanisms for OAuth. RFC 7628. https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC7628

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGUCCS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference
March 2023
97 pages
ISBN:9781450394116
DOI:10.1145/3539811
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 March 2023

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Email Service
  2. Exchange Online
  3. Microsoft 365
  4. User Authentication

Qualifiers

  • Poster
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

SIGUCCS '23
Sponsor:
SIGUCCS '23: ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference
March 26 - 29, 2023
IL, Chicago, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 192 of 261 submissions, 74%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 62
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)15
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media