Proposals/Done/Improve Password Storage: Difference between revisions
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(Created page with "This is a brief overview on how to improve the password storage in Mahara. This is only for user passwords stored in the usr table. Currently, these passwords are stored as a s…") |
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The layout this page suggests is: | The layout this page suggests is: | ||
* On login, check whether it is using the new hash technique, if so use that | |||
** Otherwise, use the old technique and if successful change the password to use the new technique (user doesn't need any input except for initial password to log in, and maybe a small pause). Next time they can use the old technique. | |||
A note about bulk uploads: | A note about bulk uploads: | ||
When uploading a CSV to create users, we don't really want to spend a large amount of time hashing passwords. Because of this I would suggest using the old technique of sha1($salt . $password) for this bulk upload of users. | When uploading a CSV to create users, we don't really want to spend a large amount of time hashing passwords. Because of this I would suggest using the old technique of sha1($salt . $password) for this bulk upload of users. | ||
Revision as of 15:23, 14 November 2011
This is a brief overview on how to improve the password storage in Mahara.
This is only for user passwords stored in the usr table.
Currently, these passwords are stored as a sha1 of the salt concatenated with the password (PHP sha1($salt . $password)). The salt is generated as $salt = substr(md5(rand(1000000, 9999999)), 2, 8);
A suggestion was made to improve the storage of these passwords by using a stronger algorithm. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/843568
The algorithm in question is bcrypt or CRYPT_BLOWFISH (available on PHP 5.3+, and below if it is available on the OS level).
The layout this page suggests is:
- On login, check whether it is using the new hash technique, if so use that
- Otherwise, use the old technique and if successful change the password to use the new technique (user doesn't need any input except for initial password to log in, and maybe a small pause). Next time they can use the old technique.
A note about bulk uploads:
When uploading a CSV to create users, we don't really want to spend a large amount of time hashing passwords. Because of this I would suggest using the old technique of sha1($salt . $password) for this bulk upload of users.