Re: Plaintext passwords

"anders conbere" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.jabber.admin
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Norman Rasmussen
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Simon Friedberger
> <[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.

Which the rest of the world has agreed is a much safer assertion then
trusting server admins to keep the passwords safe. (see reddit for
example of leaking passwords). Frankly it's just a bad idea to store
the passwords in plain-text and the sooner that gets fixed not only in
the spec but as an understanding within the community the better.

~ Anders

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