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Brian Nixon commented on ZOOKEEPER-3197: ---------------------------------------- Password is probably the wrong term for this variable (though it does suggest some potential future work). It's more of a checksum that's used in reconnection, carries no security weight, and is treated internally as if it carries no security weight. [~breed] might be the only one left who knows the full story (it's telling that the secret decodes to "Ben is Cool"). > Improve documentation in ZooKeeperServer.superSecret > ---------------------------------------------------- > > Key: ZOOKEEPER-3197 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER-3197 > Project: ZooKeeper > Issue Type: Task > Reporter: Colm O hEigeartaigh > Priority: Trivial > > A security scan flagged the use of a hard-coded secret > (ZooKeeperServer.superSecret) in conjunction with a java Random instance to > generate a password: > byte[] generatePasswd(long id) > { Random r = new Random(id ^ superSecret); byte p[] = > new byte[16]; r.nextBytes(p); return p; } > superSecret has the following javadoc: > /** > * This is the secret that we use to generate passwords, for the moment it > * is more of a sanity check. > */ > It is unclear from this comment and looking at the code why it is not a > security risk. It would be good to update the javadoc along the lines of > "Using a hard-coded secret with Random to generate a password is not a > security risk because the resulting passwords are used for X, Y, Z and not > for authentication etc" or something would be very helpful for anyone else > looking at the code. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v7.6.3#76005)