Timwi timwi@gmx.net writes:
However, I can see two problems with it. Firstly, if the hash is known, then the password might not be too difficult to crack anymore (because you can just do it locally). Seconlyd, users are probably generally too stupid to handle it correctly. Some people will put such a hashed URL into a public RSS reader (e.g. LiveJournal) and then complain that other people can reed their feed.
Admittedly, the latter problem is probably not quite as bad on Wikipedia.
That's a valid argument. A dictionary attack might be a problem especially considering the problem that most users still use very weak passwords. So additionally we could add a date of the last change into the string where we calculate the hash from. I see that the user_touched field already exists in the database. Could we use this? So for example a calculation like $hash=sha1($user_id.$user_name.$user_password.$user_touched)
Of course then we would need to give a user-friendly error message once the user can not be authenticated. I'm thinking about a single valid RSS item saying that the user could not be authenticated and explaining the fact, that a new URL must be used after every edit.
Or if we don't have too many options in the settings yet, we could make including the $user_touched variable optional... :-)
Regards Patrice