[1043] in Coldmud discussion meeting
Re: [COLD] An alternative to common crypt() handling.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wed Jul 24 17:55:09 1996
)
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 16:26:31 -0500 (CDT)
From: Brad Roberts <braddr@puremagic.com>
To: Brandon Gillespie <brandon@tombstone.sunrem.com>
cc: coldstuff@cold.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960724121737.25548A-100000@tombstone.sunrem.com>
All well and good.. but how does this fix the cross platform
transportability of the still encrypted passwords?
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996, Brandon Gillespie wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but 'crypt()' exists for one purpose, and that
> is handling passwords. What I suggest is taking a step towards greater
> abstraction by adding two things:
>
> * a match_crypted() builtin.
> * a encrypted data type.
>
> The key is the encrypted data type's literal representation would be:
>
> "ENCRYPTED"
>
> The only way to create encrypted data would be through 'crypt()'. When
> matching encrypted data you would pass it to 'match_crypted()'. The only
> time the actual true value of the encrypted data would be seen is in a
> text dump, at which point it would be whatever is behind the scenes (such
> as DES or MD5 or whatever).
>
> This has two advantages:
>
> * Abstracting with match_crypted() means you dont have problems when
> different implementations store the seed in different locations
> (such as FreeBSD and MD5).
> * Security is heightened as only people with login access to the
> filesystem can even see the true value of a password.
>
> Basically, its like creating shadow passwords in unix..
>
> Comments?
>
> -Brandon Gillespie
>