JAVA - Active directory and ldap password properties

Question

I'm using a program that adds correctly a user to AD using LDAP protocol. I noticed that there are some properties about the password. There are userPassoword that stores password in clear and unicodePwd that accepts encoded pwd. I'm working in a project where a lot of users were created by the admin in AD, using Windows server administration tool. But what suprise me more, is that these users have password and the app workws fine with the login...but BOTH properties are empty! So, where are the password? By Java I have to add the passwords in the same way, but I cannot figure out how to approach the problem, because I don't know where those users' password are stored. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You cannot read a password from AD. There is special logic in the directory to handle writes to those attributes, but, there is no read capability. They will always appear to be null.