Working with Abuse Response Format E-Mails

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OTRS is well known for its powerful E-Mail filters. Also OTRS is used a lot in abuse departments, NOCs and CERTs.

Some years ago a messages format, called Abuse Response Format – ARF was designed to help to automate data exchange on spams, fraud or other abuse of E-Mails. AOL is using this format for their Postmaster Feedback Loop. Reviewing the setup of one of an OTRS used for security and abuse handling I had the idea to create a postmaster filter for writing some of the data into Ticket Free Fields.

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Using one time passwords for securing login

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Sometimes the basic authentication provided by OTRS via database or LDAP is not enough for securing the access to an application. RFC 4226 describes the generation and usage of one time passwords and two way authentication.

To make OTRS using OTP for the login of the agents we need to install mod-authn-otp as apache auth module. After downloading and compiling the module we need to activate it in the apache configuration.

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Fixing the SOAP interface for OTRS (updated)

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As you might be aware, OTRS is written in Perl. One of the benefits of Perl is the lively ecosystem that is called CPAN. On CPAN people can upload modules to achieve common functions, e.g. talking to a database using the great DBI module or using Twitter (Net::Twitter) or by using any of the many, many other modules.

The current module that OTRS uses for it’s SOAP interface is SOAP::Lite. It has one particularly nasty issue in the latest few releases, where the HTTP transport does not work if run under mod_perl. It just happens to be that most OTRS (and Bugzilla, for that matter) systems are deployed using mod_perl and SOAP::Lite. This means that if you use the latest SOAP::Lite version, the SOAP interface for OTRS is not usable. The second issue is that many of the current Linux distributions (Debian Squeeze, RHEL 6, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) are now shipping with this broken version of SOAP::Lite.

Momma's Soap DishDowngrading the module is also not the best option, because versions that don’t have this bug actually don’t work well with the latest perl. So there’s no nice way to solve the issue. There IS a patch available, which is really simple, but there is no good way to actually get it installed on your OTRS instance. That is, until now. I used the OPM format to create a patched package that you can install on your OTRS 2.4.x or 3.0.x server. Now you have an easy way to get a working SOAP interface on your OTRS system, just install the package, and you’re good. And in case the module author decides to release a fixed version of the module on CPAN, or if your distribution decides to bundle the patch, you can also easily remove the package from OTRS.

UPDATE: Since August 2011 there IS a new release of SOAP::Lite available on CPAN. Unfortunately, some Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu) still have not incorporated a patch in their systems, they still have broken versions, so you might still want to install the .opm package below. Fedora (and thus also Red Hat and CentOS) are supposed to ship the old SOAP::Lite version but with the fix inside. Obviously, the version number is still the same, so the OTRS CheckModules script would still complain, but the issue is gone, and that’s what counts.

Download the package here:

http://users.otrs.com/~mb/SOAP-Lite-0.714.opm

If you’re interested, here’s the bug report in RT: 58538. And if you are not trying to fix OTRS but for instance Bugzilla, you can also fetch the  .tar.gz of the module from CPAN, and install using ‘perl Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install’, or just install the latest version from CPAN with your favorite CPAN client.