[Mailman-Developers] Making passwords easier for users

[Jim Hebert]

On 23 Apr 2000, Owen Taylor wrote:

> The other password related modification I was thinking of doing
> locally here is a little bit more radical - making it so that all
> passwords for a given email address are interchangable. Quite a few

[I am not a mailman developer. If I shouldn't be posting my .02, someone
please thwap me with the clue paddle...]

This change has the effect of reducing the strength of the passwords: if I
am on 15 lists with 15 different passwords, a dictionary attack against
any of them is 15 times more likely to succeed and brings me 15 times more
access for having broken it. 

OTOH, if you keep all your list passwords the same, the success
probability is unchanged versus one list membership, but the latter
observation that you get 15x the access is still true, so it's somewhat of
a red herring.

Also, I don't know how much of a threat scenario this is, but if I can
subscribe otaylor@redhat.com to some other list on the machine with a
password of my choosing, I have the equivalent access of having otaylor's
actual password(s) for the other lists. There are at least some sites
where there isn't mutual trust among the list-owners.

That said, admittedly, the security of ones list subscriptions aren't
exactly the crown jewels. And people probably aren't exactly
seeing massive dictionary attacks against their mailman
installations... If this was a configurable thing for the paranoid (me?)
defaulting to the current behavior I guess it couldn't hurt, eh?


jim
king-for-a-day of esoterica?

--
Jim Hebert                                       http://www.cosource.com/
jim@cosource.com          The cooperative market for open source software