Memisyazici, Aras wrote: > John: > > Thank you for your reply. > > Indeed, as I tried to explain in my previous reply, my "suggestion" in > obscurity as a means of securing things, was not meant as (encryption of > encryption) ^ ?, rather building another barrier to make it "harder" for > compromise. Which we can't do, because we need to be able to generate the hash a given server requires. Some protocols can ask for different types of hashes at various times, and if we store the password in a non-reversible hash we lose the ability to use these protocols. Not to mention the fact that it still does nothing but provide a false sense of security, which we feel is worse than no security at all. > IMO, a "real" solution would be to be able to deploy/install Pidgin in a > fashion so that: > > a) the accounts.xml file's location can be overriden (so that I can re-direct > to a network shared TrueCrypt drive over an IPSEC protected pipe in a VLAN'd > network :p) This can already be done--on a Windows system, which this so-called "vulnerability disclosure" obviously focused solely on, forcing the PURPLEHOME environment variable to be set by a user's logon script will use the specified path for not just accounts.xml but all configuration and data files for Pidgin. The pidgin.exe binary can also be renamed and replaced with a script (or executable stub) that calls the renamed binary with the -c option to specify a different location for the configuration directory. We have no intention of allowing individual files to be relocated outside the configuration directory through any measure other than symbolic links. > b) to be able to disable the "Save Password" option and ensure it cannot be > overridden by the user by default I'm sure we'd accept a patch that allowed this in a portable fashion--i.e. one not tied to any specific OS. As it is, however, I seriously doubt any of us care to implement this ourselves. > In an institution where the authentication piece is tied into the universal > PIM LDAP, as-is, the usage of your application puts us in awkward position, > as it has been deemed against the policies to "store" such authentication > information in the open in an easily accessible location. > > Per your post on http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords here, > AFAIK there still isn't any plugin that decrypts/encrypts the saved password > file either :/ There is no intent to ever provide encryption on the file itself or the passwords stored in it (again, the false sense of security). If your file system's permissions model is insufficient to protect the file, find a better filesystem. If your understanding of the file system's permissions model is insufficient, learn about it. NTFS and all common UNIX file systems provide adequate protection for the file; arguments about the disk falling into the wrong hands don't really carry any weight, because if the disk is lost you're screwed whether there's a hash or encryption or anything else. If your disk is lost, you have much bigger problems than lost IM passwords. However, the ability to use external keyrings for more "secure" storage of passwords has been the focus of a Google Summer of Code project this year. > Such position your team is taking, pretty much ties our hands and cripples us > on spreading the good word about Pidgin: IMO one of the best chat > applications out there! If our position on any matter costs us a few users, we're willing to live with that. Being the most popular IM application has never been our goal--our goal is to make Pidgin the best client it can be for ourselves and those who think and act like we do. John
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