On Friday 21 March 2003 02:06 am, Jaroslav Lukesh wrote:

: Odesílatel: Terry Hancock <hancock@anansispaceworks.com> : 1) You can't remind the user of their password, because you : don't have it. You could generate temporary random password

Yes you can, but it annoys users. You can afford to annoy your users if and only if you have a captive audience (like they work for your company), which unfortunately is not the case for me. ;-) If I went (back) to such a scheme, I'd have to offer users a choice, which would be sort of unpleasant on the programming side. So I've been thinking about the problem some more to see if there's something better. In principle, if I use SSL for connections, then the only real risk is that an outsider can get hold of the user database used for authentication. But that's probably not really that hard. Right now, it doesn't matter so much, because the protected information isn't that sensitive -- so we use plaintext (and not even SSL) now, but in the future, we might be storing more sensitive information. Another option is to actually use two passwords -- a low security one that does the current job and a higher-security one for the expansion stuff (and encrypt that one in the usual way). That's sort of annoying too, though. Still thinking about it. Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com