David, Stephen, > I noted that this was a problem back in August, 2002: > > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2002-08/msg00253.php > > Then, as now, the developers weren't very concerned. Well, from our perspective, a random salt only protects against a very narrow range of attack types -- ones in which the attacker already has access to the physical database and wants to reverse-engineer user's passwords. We'd be much more interested in the implementation of more/better authentication mechanisms. See follow-up dicussion on pgsql-hackers. Of course, if either of you *wrote* a random-salt patch for PostgreSQL, psql and libpq, then that would be a different story. I don't know that anyone has anything *against* a random salt. It's just not nearly as useful as, for example, implementing SHA1. -- --Josh Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco
