Re: Not so much a bug as a warning of new brute force attack

[jpb () magicnet net (Joe Block)]

> On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Brett L. Hawn wrote:
> What about a fascist passwd program which refers to a dictionary and
> rejects "easy" passwords? Does such an animal exist?

One of the sample programs in _Programming Perl_ is a perl passwd that does
just that - checks for length, checks against dictionary files, checks to
make sure you're not using simple two word combinations, makes sure they're
not a social security or phone number, makes sure you're not using your
userid/name, someone else on the systems userid/name, checks for license
plates, sequences of consecutive keys on the keyboard, entries in
/etc/hosts, makes sure that if you're using the "type in the first char of
each word of a phrase" method of generating your password that you don't
use a common phrase, and even keeps a history of the passwords you've used
and doesn't let you reuse them.

It seems pretty thorough.

Joe Block <jpb () magicnet net>

System Administrator
Magicnet Inc
407-657-2202 (v)
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