in reply to Two-Way Password Encryption

Note that if you store something in a cookie, and all that's required for authentication is to echo back what's in the cookie, it hardly matters whether you store an encrypted password, or a random number. You will be vunerable against session hijacking. Someone able to snoop the connection between the client and the server can intercept the cookie, and hence pretent to be the person that is logged in.

You might want to consider using an encrypted channel instead.

Abigail

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Re: Re: Two-Way Password Encryption
by petesmiley (Friar) on May 07, 2003 at 15:23 UTC
    To simplify this response...++ by the way :) authenticating by any method over SSL is preferrable.

    Speaking of which does anyone know where I can get a good tool for making my own certificates. I work on mostly internal stuff, so I don't have much use for buying one from a certificate authority. The one that comes with mod_ssl is kind of clunky if you ask me.

    smiles

[reply]

      Give openSSL a try for self-signed certificates. It works on many platforms and has all the features you might need for this task (and then some...)

      Best regards

      -lem, but some call me fokat

[reply]
      At the apache-ssl website, they have these instructions on how to create a test certificate. I did it today as a matter of fact.
      Here's the dirt just in case you don't want to follow the link:
      how do I create a test certificate?

Step one - create the key and request:

  openssl req -new > new.cert.csr

Step two - remove the passphrase from the key (optional):

  openssl rsa -in privkey.pem -out new.cert.key

Step three - convert request into signed cert:

   openssl x509 -in new.cert.csr -out new.cert.cert -req -signkey new.cert.key -days 365

      Replace the word new-cert with a variable, and you could easily turn this into a quite simple script to spit out certificates as fast as the script will run.

      This is obviously just a way to create certificates, making your web server of choice use them, is another animal.


      Very funny Scotty... Now PLEASE beam down my PANTS!
[reply]

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