<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Say that your application offers a way for each user to set/change his own password.

When I (using your application) change my password, you could combine my new password with a secret value and then send the result to the PG server (so now the PG server thinks that my password is my_password+your_secret).

This is a special case of (2,2) secret sharing:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

Here the secret is the actual password, a+b, shared into two parts, a and b. The above scheme suffers from the problem that the user now knows quite a lot about the secret. If this is an issue, there are more sophisticated combining schemes that give the user no advantage over someone who knows neither half of the secret.

- John D. Burger
  MITRE




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