Password hiding in UNIX Post: 302841867

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Password hiding in UNIX Post 302841867 by rbatte1 on Thursday 8th of August 2013 05:04:52 AM

08-08-2013

Moderator

To Scott,

I have dreamed of such a function. Wonderful.

To mohanalakshmi,

Are you wanting to somehow encrypt the password and store it in a file? If so, you need to think of how you are going to mix it up and how you are going to reverse it. Maybe we can help with that, but you jhave to consider how you make the method secure. If someone can read the file and gets the string Krfmase7fjh!kwern and can read you code on how to reverse it, then the can manually follow the process. Even if you convert it to unprintable characters, then they could still use od to get the character codes and work from there.

If your decrypting script does something like this:-

Read access encrypted password from file
Decrypt value and feed to another command in plain text

..... then the above is a problem. If your logic follows more that:-

You store the encrypted password
Another process has to check the user password by encrypting and matching the stored value

... then this may be better, however if you code continues by doing something obvious because the password check is confirmed, then if they can read your code, they can just do the same but exclude the password checking. Consider:-

Code:

read passwd?"What is the password? "
check_password $passwd
if [ $? = 0 ]      # True returned from check_password function for accepted password
then
   vi /data_dir/payroll_file
else
   echo "You are not authorised!"
fi

There is nothing to stop a user reading this and just running vi /data_dir/payroll_file

What are you actually trying to achieve?

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

rbatte1

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LEARN ABOUT SUSE

shadow

SHADOW(5)							File Formats Manual							 SHADOW(5)

NAME

       shadow - encrypted password file

DESCRIPTION

       shadow contains the encrypted password information for user's accounts and optional the password aging information. Included is

	    Login name

	    Encrypted password

	    Days since Jan 1, 1970 that password was last changed

	    Days before password may be changed

	    Days after which password must be changed

	    Days before password is to expire that user is warned

	    Days after password expires that account is disabled

	    Days since Jan 1, 1970 that account is disabled

	    A reserved field

       The  password  field must be filled. The encryped password consists of 13 to 24 characters from the 64 characters alphabet a thru z, A thru
       Z, 0 thru 9, . and /. Optionally it can start with a "$" character. This means the encrypted password was generated using another (not DES)
       algorithm. For example if it starts with "$1$" it means the MD5-based algorithm was used.

       Refer to crypt(3) for details on how this string is interpreted.

       The  date  of  the  last  password change is given as the number of days since Jan 1, 1970. The password may not be changed again until the
       proper number of days have passed, and must be changed after the maximum number of days.  If the minimum number of days required is greater
       than the maximum number of day allowed, this password may not be changed by the user.

       An  account is considered to be inactive and is disabled if the password is not changed within the specified number of days after the pass-
       word expires.  An account will also be disabled on the specified day regardless of other password expiration information.

       This information supercedes any password or password age information present in /etc/passwd.

       This file must not be readable by regular users if password security is to be maintained.

FILES

       /etc/passwd    - user account information
       /etc/shadow    - encrypted user passwords

SEE ALSO

       chage(1), login(1), passwd(1), su(1), passwd(5), pwconv(8), pwunconv(8), sulogin(8)

AUTHOR

       Julianne Frances Haugh (jockgrrl@ix.netcom.com)

																	 SHADOW(5)

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