Zdenek Styblik wrote:
Jonathan Clarke wrote:
On 30/09/2009 07:43, Zdenek Styblik wrote: ...
I believe this is broken, or obsolete. I'm using Perl port of Unix crypt() function, and it works just fine for "any" password lengths. 8 characters limitation sounds like - history :)
Actually crypt() is system-dependant. Different *nixes implement it differently. Many implementations accept passwords of any length, but only use the first 8 characters to create the hash. As a result, using crypt passwords is insecure and un-portable.
So, yes, it sounds like history, but that's crypt for you :)
Regards, Jonathan
Errr ... well, it seems so. I think I've hit the wall with eg. sshd x nss-switch when having passwords crypted by anything else than crypt();
nsswitch should not be used to authenticate against LDAP. That's what PAM is for. Clients should never know (let alone care) how the password is stored inside the LDAP server.
Also, using SSHA might be a bit of overkill (I'm not defending crypt()! :)) So, what's left? Or more, what's the suggestion - which crypt function to use?
SSHA is the default; if you have to ask then you probably shouldn't change it.