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Special Forums Cybersecurity Password Automation pros/cons Post 302295832 by pludi on Monday 9th of March 2009 05:46:52 PM
Old 03-09-2009
If it's a password for an account which is only used for automated processing, an expiry period of 6 months is a bit much, especially if the account owner doesn't need to know the password (why is there one anyways). In that case I'd rather opt for a very, very complex password (max out length, use special characters as much as possible, ... something like ]?fb6#Z8"2a[{?(Cl+$? ) that's valid for the next 2 years or so.

Or, even better, if that password is used to remotely connect to a system, drop it altogether and switch to public key authentication with at least 2048 bit keys, those should be save for the next decade or so (just don't use an old Debian to generate them)
 

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auth(5) 							File Formats Manual							   auth(5)

Name
       auth - auth database

Description
       The  database is a repository of security-relevant information about each user of the system. This database contains the encrypted password
       associated with the user's account in addition to a list of assorted capabilities.  The database is stored as an database in the files  and
       Records are retrieved with the library routine.	Access to the database is restricted to the superuser and members of the group

       Auth records may be converted to an ASCII representation whose format is:
       1000:4KvidFYwovnwp3j8lll78dC1:1920129:3600:2678400:03:0:1000:0:00:00
       The first field is the UID of the entry that is used as the key into the database. Then follows:

       Encrypted Password
		      This  is the user's encrypted password. Whether this password or the one from the file is actually used is determined by the
		      security level that the system is running at.

       Password Modification Time
		      This is the time(2) the password was last set.

       Minimum Password Lifetime
		      This is the minimum number of seconds which must elapse between setting passwords.

       Maximum Password Lifetime
		      This is the maximum period of time for which the password will be valid.

       Account Mask   These are capabilities pertaining to the account itself.	They are:

			 1 A_ENABLE: this account is enabled.
			 2 A_CHANGE_PASSWORD: The user can change his or her password.
			 4 A_ENTER_PASSWORD: The user is not required to use machine-generated passwords.

       Login Failure Count
		      This is the count of unsuccessful login attempts since the last successful login.

       Audit ID       Positive integer identifier used in generating audit records for the user.

       Audit Control  See the reference page, SET_APROC_CNTL section for more information.

       Audit Mask     Determines which events will be audited for the user. See the and reference pages for more information.

Restrictions
       Only the superuser and members of the group may read information from the auth database.  Only the superuser may modify the auth database.

Files
See Also
       audcntl(2), getauthuid(3), getpwent(3), edauth(8)

																	   auth(5)
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