Re: SimpleMD5 quibbles

I suggested having an encoded (encrypted) password in the server-side
password file.

John Franks said:
  > This is a good idea, but it is important to understand that it doesn't
  > really protect you the way you might think.  It is still necessary to
  > protect the password file from being read by any untrusted user.  If
  > an untrusted user gets the encoded password f(passwd) he can create
  > MD5(nonce f(passwd)) and access everything the user with passwd is
  > entitled to.  The reason it is a good idea is that people foolishly
  > tend to use the same password on many systems so the sysadmin on the
  > SimpleMD5 system might read the password and guess that the user has
  > that password on a different system.

I certainly agree, and I don't want to imply that I believe this is
bullet-proof security.  The point, though, is that if I grabbed a
password from the server-side file, I could masquerade as a user by
simply entering that user's password to my favorite browser.  If the
password is encoded, I have to go to some more trouble to spoof the
user, because I can't simply supply the encoded value to the browser.

Dave Kristol