Re: Plaintext passwords

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Simon Friedberger
<[email protected]<simon%[email protected]>
> wrote:

> I was wondering why ejabberd only allows saving passwords in plaintext.
> If this has been already discussed I'm sorry to bring it up again.
> Somebody in the ejabberd muc pointed me at their FAQ but it didn't
> give any real reasons so maybe somebody could point me in the right
> direction.
>

Because it makes it simpler and easier to make it possible to confirm that
the client knows the same password without having send it over the wire when
authenticating, (or encrypt it before sending).
Another reason is that it doesn't matter how the password is encrypted, if
the jabber server binary can read it, then so can the server admin.

The only non-plaintext storage that makes any sense, is probably digest-md5.
 Although then the only way to 'upgrade' a password from say md5 to sha1, if
for the client to provide a plaintext password - which is what we're trying
to avoid.

With the proposed requirement of TLS encryption when connecting to a server,
the plaintext requirement is only slightly relaxed -- you end up trusting
the TLS layer to protect your password from attack.

-- 
- Norman Rasmussen
- Email: [email protected]
- Home page: http://norman.rasmussen.co.za/

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