From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Andrew" Subject: Re: Password Encryption & Philosophy Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 10:05:57 +0100 Sender: linux-c-programming-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <002801c32759$5c6c9b60$a885bc3e@alanmari> References: <001a01c3236e$6249bc00$ed64a8c0@descartes> <000c01c32693$4d336e10$ed64a8c0@descartes> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: "John T. Williams" Cc: linux-c-programming Is it necessary to store the password? IMHO it is bad policy to store the password anyway because if someone gets physical access to your box they can access everything without having to even look in the password file. This could be collegues at work, friends or family at home, quite a lot of people really. I'd avoid it if possible and not add the 'feature'. If it has to go in I would encrypt it to disk, what you need to find is something reasonably uniqe to seed it with. Perhaps a nic mac address or something like that. Lets face it, if someone is really serious about it they can get round anything, it only took a couple of weeks for versions of XP with the security functions completely by-passed to start making the rounds for instance. ----- Original Message ----- From: "John T. Williams" To: "John T. Williams" Cc: "linux-c-programming" Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 11:07 AM Subject: Password Encryption & Philosophy > I had a problem, and I was wondering if anyone had a solution. > I'm writing a client which gives the user the option to store their > password, and I want to lend some security to the password being stored. My > problem is that no matter what algorithm I use to encrypt and decrypt the > password (it can't be a one way hash, bc I have to be able to send it to the > server in its original form), anyone who has access to the source code and > the encrypted password can get the original password back. Does anyone have > any suggestions on how to encrypt a password with an open source algorithm > and yet lend more security stored information. > > Sincerly, > John T. Williams > jtwilliams@vt.edu > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-c-programming" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > >