Start a new thread,

Neil Harris wrote:

Actually, digital identity management is more important than ever, and this time it looks like it's going to be done right. SUL is an important part of helping make that happen for Wikipedia and all of its attendant projects.

I agree, wearing two hats: the operations and security communities....

Good engineering practices often require stepwise refinement.

Single User Login may have been originally envisioned for convenience, but the ease of use and project-wide consistency can also encourage better security practices.

I agree that changes to the login procedure can wait until SUL is deployed, as long as enhancements are well planned beforehand.

Speaking to elements of the recent thread, I'd prefer SSL instead of home-grown challenge-response algorithms. As I'm the author of several well-known challenge-response protocols, and an experienced network operator, I can speak to the difficulty of proper implementation and operation! Use the existing tools, where the problems are understood and mitigated on a world-wide basis.

I also agree with Ivan (and others) that there is no technical problem with MD5 as a salted hashing algorithm in this instance. But I do prefer some flexibility toward future use of other algorithms for diversity.

I suggest that the software default to MD5 (as now), but the presence of the "sha1:" prefix indicate the alternative. It seems reasonable to design a migration path for the future, and that migration code should be well tested before migration occurs.

I don't agree that sha256 be used until that is a standard part of the software package. Experience has shown the folly of relying on insufficiently deployed and tested security implementations.