Re: storing passwords
Re: storing passwords
- Subject: Re: storing passwords
- From: David Rio Vierra <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 05:44:50 -1000
There is the unix crypt() function for creating DES password hashes.
See 'man 3 crypt' for details. If anyone knows about any better
functions for this purpose, please chime in. You can store the
encrypted password in a file(XML or otherwise), and set its permissions
to octal 400 or equivalent so that only the file's owner can read it.
When your program creates this file, it is usually owned by the user
who launched the process. Of course, this won't stop an uninformed
user from simply giving the file away.
- Rio
On Tuesday, December 24, 2002, at 04:47 AM, David A. Feldman wrote:
I suppose this is as much a generic development question as a Cocoa
one, but perhaps someone can help me. I have an app that logs onto
remote AppleShare servers. I've been having a lot of difficulty
getting it to work with the Keychain -- and have posted here before
about that -- but I'm realizing that for unattended operation (which
is desirable for this app) the Keychain may not be the best option
anyway, since whenever there's a change to the OS it re-requests
permission to unlock the Keychain.
I don't have a lot of experience writing security code. So, what I'm
wondering is this. Is there a way to securely store and retrieve
users' passwords and save them in the app's data file? Some way to
encrypt in such a way that my app can decrypt but no one else can?
Furthermore, the data file is human-readable (and XML property list).
If encrypted passwords are stored in it, is there any way to tighten
security further so that someone who gains access to the data file
can't just go ahead and use the encrypted password with a copy of my
app to gain access to the remote server(s)? And if not, will users see
that as a potential security hole? Thanks.
--Dave
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David A. Feldman
User Interface Designer
email@hidden
http://InterfaceThis.com
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