On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
Hi Eduardo,
I know you've been working a lot on alpine lately, and I wanted to pass
this along.
I haven't dug into the source code, but one Debian user reports that the
-passfile option seems to have no effect.
Another reports that -passfile works fine so long as the file already
exists before alpine starts.
Dear Asheesh,
I use a password file, and do not have problems with it, so I am not
sure how to reproduce any problems with it. I am using the alpha version
now, but I also did not have password file problems with version 2.11.
If there is a way to reproduce the problem, I would like to know it so I
can fix any issues with it.
It seems to me that users would be best-served if alpine was willing to
create passfile files. Or, if not, users would be second-best-served by
alpine exiting with an error, asking the user to create the file.
I had not seriously thought about creating the password file for the user.
Continuing the old Alpine tradition, the file is not created
automatically, because it is assumed that using a password file is not
secure, due to the low encryption of the file. If anyone gets a hold of
it, figuring out the passwords in it is very easy. Therefore, users that
are not technically inclined would be at risk.
My point of view in this situation is that doing things related to
passwords automatically is a decision to be made between convenience and
security. If there was a way to implement password file support without
sacrificing security, I would go for the convenience, but since I have not
found such way, I side for security at this time.
The better news is that the way Alpine protects your password file since
version 2.10 is by encrypting it with a S/MIME key, namely the first one
it finds in the ~/.alpine-smime/private directory. In order to decrypt the
file, one needs the password for the key. This makes it more secure, but
the security can be by-passed if the user removes the password from the
key. The next version will have many more improvements on this support,
but I still consider it not 100% secure because it is possible to unlock a
key (and hence the password file) without a password.
To conclude, I did some tests with password file support in the latest
alpha version. I got a crash, which I fixed, and this was not in version
2.11, it was in the alpha-version only. Other than that, I did not have
any trouble, so it is possible that the problem that you are hearing about
I have not reproduced it yet. If I could be given directions on how to
reproduce the problem, from the "configure" stage, I would appreciate it.
Thank you.
--
Eduardo
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