zope.password 3.5.0

Password encoding and checking utilities

Password Manager

This package provides a password manager mechanism. Password manager is an utility object that can encode and check encoded passwords. Beyond the generic interface, this package also provides four implementations:

• PlainTextPasswordManager - the most simple and the less secure one. It does not do any password encoding and simply checks password by string equality. It’s useful in tests or as a base class for more secure implementations.

• MD5PasswordManager - a password manager that uses MD5 algorithm to encode passwords. It adds salt to the encoded password, but the salt is not used for encoding the password itself, so the use of salt in it is purely cosmetical. It’s generally weak against dictionary attacks.

• SHA1PasswordManager - a password manager that uses SHA1 algorithm to encode passwords. It has the same salt weakness as the MD5PasswordManager.

• SSHAPasswordManager - the most secure password manager that is strong against dictionary attacks. It’s basically SHA1-encoding password manager which also incorporates a salt into the password when encoding it. This password manager is compatible with passwords used in LDAP databases.

It is strongly recommended to use SSHAPasswordManager, as it’s the most secure.

Usage

It’s very easy to use password managers. The zope.password.interfaces.IPasswordManager interface defines only two methods:

def encodePassword(password):
    """Return encoded data for the given password"""

def checkPassword(encoded_password, password):
    """Return whether the given encoded data coincide with the given password"""

The implementations mentioned above are in the zope.password.password module.

CHANGES

3.5.0 (2009-03-06)

First release. This package was splitted off from zope.app.authentication to separate password manager functionality that is greatly re-usable without any bit of zope.app.authentication and to reduce its dependencies.