[Zope] Reversible encryption on passwords?

[Terry Hancock]

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