Re: making smb remember passwords

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Ken,

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 10:31, Ken Deeter wrote:
> > 	Gconf keys are persisted to disk unpredictably; and one should never
> > persist a password to disk; even passing it around freely between apps
> > is risky IMHO.

> Well.. most people have their rsa private keys in their home directory.
> You could say thats worse than storing passwords ;-)

	Not so; you'd be foolish indeed to have a private key that was not
pass-phrase protected.

> When I took a class with Ed felten, he use to say that security means
> nothing if you don't have physical security (meaning that any kind of
> encryption/password blah is pointless if someone can watch you type on
> your keyboard or hack your server by swapping its hard drive.)

	That's true enough; but stopping plain-text versions of your password
going over the network (NFS/GConf) is very clearly preferable to being
theoretically vunerable to snooping via. a K/B sniffer.

> but I don't think it would be that bad to store passwords in some manner.
> The benefit it seems to me far outweight the costs or risks.

	Au contraire, I think it would be terrible to store strong passwords;
except in the memory of a single process (the VFS daemon) - preferably a
write-only storage for such things.

	Consider that ssh-agent (which is a good model for this), is the only
thing to store your private key - real; and that even remote ssh-agent's
don't get that, but rather get to proxy the challenge/response via a
chain of remote ssh-agents. etc. etc.

	Storing the pwd in gconf/on disk is just not going to happen ;-) [
except for uber-weak proxy (et. al.) passwords ].

> time to go read about libgnomeui... (sorry) 

	:-) It's a mass of different widgets.

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot