Password Incompatibilties

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1043 at brchh104.bnr.ca> drm at gaia.gcs.oz.au (David Moline) writes:
>Anyway now with SunOS 4.1 the passwd command has options for aging and
>expiring passwords (IMHO this is a great feature)...

Actually it is a cretinous feature, unless they've considerably improved
on past implementations of it.  The idea of putting limits on password age
is good, but springing "your password is too old, I insist that you change
it *NOW*" on a user as a surprise is a devastating botch in user
interface.  The result tends to be passwords chosen in haste, i.e. poorly.

For more commentary on this, see Grampp&Morris, "UNIX Operating System
Security", Bell Labs Technical Journal, Oct 1984.  It's amazing that the
people at AT&T and Sun still do not seem to have read this well-known
paper.

If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry