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External Validation of Voicemail Passwords
By default, Asterisk does not validate user passwords to ensure they are at least some‐
what secure. Anyone who maintains voicemail systems will tell you that a large per‐
centage of mailbox users set their passwords to something like 1234 or 1111, or some
other string that’s easy to guess. Although fraud bots aren’t typically interested in
making mischief, having lousy passwords does represent a security hole in the voice‐
mail system.
Since the app_voicemail.so module does not have the built-in ability to validate
passwords, the settings externpass, externpassnotify, and externpasscheck allow
you to validate them using an external program. Asterisk will call the program based
on the path you specify, and pass it the following arguments:
mailbox context oldpass newpass
The voicemail.conf File
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The script will then evaluate the arguments based on rules that you defined in the
external script, and, accordingly, it should return to Asterisk a value of VALID for suc‐
cess or INVALID for failure (actually, the return value for a failed password can be any‐
thing except the words VALID or FAILURE). This value is typically printed to stdout. If
the script returns INVALID, Asterisk will play an invalid-password prompt and the
user will need to attempt something different.
Ideally, you would want to implement rules such as the following:
• Passwords must be a minimum of six digits in length
• Passwords must not be strings of repeated digits (e.g., 111111)
• Passwords must not be strings of contiguous digits (e.g., 123456 or 987654)
Asterisk comes with a simple script that will greatly improve the security of your
voicemail system. It is located in the source code under the folder: /contrib/scripts/
voicemailpwcheck.py.
We strongly recommend that you copy it to your /usr/local/bin folder (or wherever
you prefer to put such things), and then uncomment the externpasscheck= option in
your voicemail.conf file. Your voicemail system will then enforce the password secu‐
rity rules you have established.
Part of the [general] section is an area of supplementary options (referred to in the
config file as advanced options, though there’s not really anything advanced about
them). These options (listed in Table 8-2) are defined in the same way as the other
options in the [general] section, but what is significant about them is that they can
also be defined on a per-mailbox basis, which would override whatever is defined
under [general] for that particular setting. In other words, the following options can
be set in the database when you create a new mailbox.
Table 8-2. A curated list of supplementary options for voicemail.conf
Option
tz
locale
Value/example
eastern, euro
pean, etc.
de_DE.utf8,
es_US.utf8, etc.
attach
yes, no
Notes
Specifies the zonemessages name, as defined under [zonemessages]
(discussed in the next section).
Used to define how Asterisk generates date/time strings in different locales. To
determine the locales that are valid on your Linux system, type locale -a at the
shell.
If an email address is specified for a mailbox, this determines whether the messages
are attached to the email notifications (otherwise, a simple message notification is
sent).
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Chapter 8: Voicemail
Option
attachfmt
Value/example
wav49, wav, etc.
exitcontext context
review
yes, no
operator