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authorZack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>2018-06-29 16:53:37 +0200
committerFlorian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>2018-06-29 16:53:37 +0200
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parent6ab902e4decd89c1a9206497d14ddba7680bfc37 (diff)
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manual: Revise crypt.texi.
This is a major rewrite of the description of 'crypt', 'getentropy', and 'getrandom'. A few highlights of the content changes: - Throughout the manual, public headers, and user-visible messages, I replaced the term "password" with "passphrase", the term "password database" with "user database", and the term "encrypt(ion)" with "(one-way) hashing" whenever it was applied to passphrases. I didn't bother making this change in internal code or tests. The use of the term "password" in ruserpass.c survives, because that refers to a keyword in netrc files, but it is adjusted to make this clearer. There is a note in crypt.texi explaining that they were traditionally called passwords but single words are not good enough anymore, and a note in users.texi explaining that actual passphrase hashes are found in a "shadow" database nowadays. - There is a new short introduction to the "Cryptographic Functions" section, explaining how we do not intend to be a general-purpose cryptography library, and cautioning that there _are_, or have been, legal restrictions on the use of cryptography in many countries, without getting into any kind of detail that we can't promise to keep up to date. - I added more detail about what a "one-way function" is, and why they are used to obscure passphrases for storage. I removed the paragraph saying that systems not connected to a network need no user authentication, because that's a pretty rare situation nowadays. (It still says "sometimes it is necessary" to authenticate the user, though.) - I added documentation for all of the hash functions that glibc actually supports, but not for the additional hash functions supported by libxcrypt. If we're going to keep this manual section around after the transition is more advanced, it would probably make sense to add them then. - There is much more detailed discussion of how to generate a salt, and the failure behavior for crypt is documented. (Returning an invalid hash on failure is what libxcrypt does; Solar Designer's notes say that this was done "for compatibility with old programs that assume crypt can never fail".) - As far as I can tell, the header 'crypt.h' is entirely a GNU invention, and never existed on any other Unix lineage. The function 'crypt', however, was in Issue 1 of the SVID and is now in the XSI component of POSIX. I tried to make all of the @standards annotations consistent with this, but I'm not sure I got them perfectly right. - The genpass.c example has been improved to use getentropy instead of the current time to generate the salt, and to use a SHA-256 hash instead of MD5. It uses more random bytes than is strictly necessary because I didn't want to complicate the code with proper base64 encoding. - The testpass.c example has three hardwired hashes now, to demonstrate that different one-way functions produce different hashes for the same input. It also demonstrates how DES hashing only pays attention to the first eight characters of the input. - There is new text explaining in more detail how a CSPRNG differs from a regular random number generator, and how getentropy/getrandom are not exactly a CSPRNG. I tried not to make specific falsifiable claims here. I also tried to make the blocking/cancellation/error behavior of both getentropy and getrandom clearer.
Diffstat (limited to 'manual/nss.texi')
-rw-r--r--manual/nss.texi12
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/manual/nss.texi b/manual/nss.texi
index d534c260d3..18361b6f42 100644
--- a/manual/nss.texi
+++ b/manual/nss.texi
@@ -84,15 +84,15 @@ Network names and numbers, @pxref{Networks Database}.
@item protocols
Network protocols, @pxref{Protocols Database}.
@item passwd
-User passwords, @pxref{User Database}.
+User identities, @pxref{User Database}.
@item rpc
-Remote procedure call names and numbers,
+Remote procedure call names and numbers.
@comment @pxref{RPC Database}.
@item services
Network services, @pxref{Services Database}.
@item shadow
-Shadow user passwords,
-@comment @pxref{Shadow Password Database}.
+User passphrase hashes and related information.
+@comment @pxref{Shadow Passphrase Database}.
@end table
@noindent
@@ -526,7 +526,7 @@ with the main application.)
The @code{get@var{XXX}by@var{YYY}} functions are the most important
functions in the NSS modules. But there are others which implement
the other ways to access system databases (say for the
-password database, there are @code{setpwent}, @code{getpwent}, and
+user database, there are @code{setpwent}, @code{getpwent}, and
@code{endpwent}). These will be described in more detail later.
Here we give a general way to determine the
signature of the module function:
@@ -650,7 +650,7 @@ general rules must be followed by all functions.
In fact there are four kinds of different functions which may appear in
the interface. All derive from the traditional ones for system databases.
@var{db} in the following table is normally an abbreviation for the
-database (e.g., it is @code{pw} for the password database).
+database (e.g., it is @code{pw} for the user database).
@table @code
@item enum nss_status _nss_@var{database}_set@var{db}ent (void)