Re: Passwords on Linux systems(for all flavors)

What about unicode charectors  in passwords.
Glynn Clements wrote:

> shyaam@gmail.com wrote:
>
>  
>
> > I would like to know the place where I can find the linux password
> > constraints for the various linux flavors. What I mean is the details
> > like number of key spaces or the key length, the types of charactors
> > that can be used, the restrictions and the number of times the
> > password can be tried if not infinite, etc. I am in need of these
> > details very urgently, so please do help me on this topic.
> >    
>
> On any system which uses PAM (which is almost every modern Linux
> system), most of these are configuration options, controlled through
> the files in /etc/pam.d and /etc/security.
>
> For the underlying libc crypt() function, assuming MD5 passwords, the
> password can be any NUL-terminated string. There is no minimum or
> maximum length, nor any restriction on which characters (bytes) the
> password can contain.
>
> However, if a password contains any control characters or non-ASCII
> (8-bit) characters, there may be problems entering it in certain
> contexts. Also, individual programs may read the password into a
> fixed-size buffer, which will impose an upper limit on the length of a
> password.
>
>  


--

Dwayne A. Ghant
Application Developer
Temple University
215.204.5555
dghant@temple.edu