Posted by Richard Lynch on 04/12/05 02:05

On Sat, April 9, 2005 1:37 pm, Skippy said:
> On Sat, 09 Apr 2005 14:51:49 -0400 trlists@clayst.com wrote:
>> A digression to a related issue (where I did take the conservative
>> approach): A system I'm working on now was originally set up with
>> password hashes in the database -- the PW itself was never stored. But
>> the client wanted an "email me my password" feature so we had to
>> encrypt and store the PW. Of course if someone had access to the
>> database they'd get a lot of other stuff probably more useful than PWs
>> so I don't worry about this too much. But I would rather have used the
>> hash.
>
> You could've changed the password for them to something random, mail it
> to them and keep the hash in the database.

You could also use a not-as-random "nice" password generator where the
user gets something like:
'babarebo' (Baa Baa Ree Bo)
instead of:
'UJVHY'
for a password.

There are a bunch of them "out there" with varying degrees of Security
value. Some are not-so-good as the possible number of supposedly random
combinations is TOO LOW.

For sure, storing passwords in clear-text in your database is a BAD IDEA.

Far too many people will use their same password for your site as
something important, and there you go leaking it to the world!

No matter how unimportant *your* password protection might be, it's too
risky to store them in plain-text.

--
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http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm

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