https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44788

Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |[email protected]

--- Comment #4 from Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> ---
I'm hesitant about putting such a feature into Extension:SecurePasswords,
primarily because I would never in my life advocate the deployment of this
extension onto WMF wikis.

Sure the idea of better password requirements is nice, but look at the rest of
the extension. It uses what is quite possibly (no offense to the author) the
most unnecessarily complicated password hashing scheme I have ever seen. And
I'll explain why step-by-step:

* Using a different hash based on the user ID - all this does is require an
attacker to change hashes for each user. It has the same security implication
as a salt. In any realistic offline attack, changing hash algorithms would be
trivial, especially since the algorithm to calculate which hash to use is
public and uses non-secret information.
* Using three different password secret keys - if the attacker gains access to
the wiki configuration, they'll have access to all three keys. More keys does
not make things better.
* Compressing the password hash - The hash is mostly random, so this would have
no effect at the expense of reducing performance and requiring a new PHP
extension dependency.
* Using mcrypt to encrypt the password hash - A better solution would be to
just HMAC the password hash with the secret keys....but it already does that.
Encrypted or unencrypted, an attacker needs access to the secret keys to even
begin brute forcing a hash, so encrypting it with a third key that the attacker
already has access to is useless.

And the most important lesson out of all of this is that it completely replaces
the current password hashing method without any method for replacing it should
a better hashing scheme come along (and it already has).

I would either make a new extension specifically for password strength or wait
for Daniel's password hashing API to be merged and then for this extension to
be changed to use that API.

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