1 User-Visible krb5-strength Changes
3 krb5-strength 3.0 (unreleased)
5 The krb5-strength plugin and heimdal-strength program now support a
6 SQLite password dictionary. This format of dictionary can detect any
7 password within edit distance one of a dictionary word, meaning that
8 the dictionary word can be formed by adding, removing, or changing a
9 single character in the password. A SQLite password dictionary can be
10 used alone or in combination with any of the other supported
11 dictionary types. SQLite dictionary support is based on work by David
14 cdbmake-wordlist has been renamed to krb5-strength-wordlist.
15 Generating CDB dictionaries now requires the -c option; see the
16 documentation for more information. A SQLite database of dictionary
17 words can now be created instead, using the -s option.
19 A password history implementation for Heimdal is now included. This
20 is a separate Perl program, heimdal-history, that stacks with the
21 external program implementation of strength checking. It is not
22 available in the form of a plugin, only as a Heimdal external password
23 quality check. (MIT Kerberos provides its own password history
24 mechanism.) This program has more extensive Perl module dependencies
25 than the other programs in this distribution.
27 A new configuration option, minimum_different, can be set to require
28 that passwords contain at least that many unique characters. This can
29 be used to reject long strings of identical characters or short
30 patterns, which may pass other checks but still be too easy to guess.
32 Update to rra-c-util 5.3:
34 * Fix portable/krb5.h build with a C++ compiler.
36 Update to C TAP Harness 3.0:
38 * Reopen standard input to /dev/null when running a test list.
39 * Don't leak extraneous file descriptors to tests.
41 krb5-strength 2.2 (2013-12-16)
43 More complex character class requirements can be specified with the
44 configuration option require_classes. This option lists the character
45 classes the password must contain. These restrictions may be
46 qualified with password length ranges, allowing the requirements to
47 change with the length of the password. See README for more details
48 and the option syntax.
50 cdbmake-wordlist now supports filtering out words based on maximum
51 length (-L) and arbitrary user-provided regular expressions (-x). It
52 also supports running in filter mode to produce a new wordlist instead
55 Close a file descriptor and memory leak in the included version of
56 CrackLib. This problem was already fixed in CrackLib 2.9.0.
58 Update to rra-c-util 4.12:
60 * Properly check the return status of snprintf and friends.
62 Update to C TAP Harness 2.3:
64 * Suppress lazy plans and test summaries if the test failed with bail.
65 * Add warn_unused_result gcc attributes to relevant functions.
67 krb5-strength 2.1 (2013-10-10)
69 Fix the package build when CDB support is disabled or TinyCDB was not
72 Some of the password rejection error messages have been changed to
73 make them more accurate or comprehensible to the user.
75 Passing --with-tinycdb to configure now correctly makes TinyCDB
76 support mandatory without adding bogus directories to the library and
79 krb5-strength 2.0 (2013-10-07)
81 Add support for the MIT Kerberos password quality plugin interface,
82 available in MIT Kerberos 1.9 and later, contributed by Greg Hudson
83 and MIT. Drop the patch for MIT Kerberos 1.4 (and hence support for
84 versions of MIT Kerberos prior to 1.9). A dictionary path set in
85 krb5.conf takes precedence over the dictionary path provided by MIT
86 Kerberos when the plugin is initialized, if both are set, to allow the
87 dict_path configuration setting to be used for other plugins while
88 using a separate dictionary for krb5-strength.
90 The default installation path for this plugin is now
91 /usr/local/lib/krb5/plugins/pwqual/strength.so (for both MIT and
92 Heimdal), assuming a --libdir setting of /usr/local/lib. This may
93 require updates to the Kerberos KDC configuration or moving the plugin
94 when upgrading from earlier versions.
96 Add support for building with TinyCDB and then checking passwords
97 against a CDB database. There is a new password_dictionary_cdb
98 krb5.conf configuration setting that configures a CDB directory to
99 use. The tests with a CDB dictionary are much simpler: passwords are
100 rejected if found in the dictionary either literally, with one or two
101 characters removed from the start or end, or with one character
102 removed from both the start and the end. Both a CrackLib and a CDB
103 dictionary can be specified to check both dictionaries. A new
104 cdbmake-wordlist utility (written in Perl) is included to ease the
105 process of creating a CDB database from a simple word list.
107 A minimum password length can now be enforced directly via the plugin
108 or external check program without relying on CrackLib. To set a
109 minimum password length, add a minimum_length setting to the
110 krb5-strength section of [appdefaults] in krb5.conf.
112 New boolean settings require_ascii_printable and require_non_letter
113 are supported in the krb5-strength setting of [appdefaults] in
114 krb5.conf. The former rejects passwords containing characters other
115 than printable ASCII characters (including space), and the latter
116 requires that passwords contain at least one character that is not a
117 letter (upper or lower case) or a space.
119 The plugin can now be configured without a dictionary, in which case
120 only checks for a password based on the principal and the simpler
121 checks available through the new configuration variables are done.
122 This mode is mostly useful for testing, since such simple checking can
123 more easily be done via less complex password strength configurations.
125 The check for passwords based on the principal now check for passwords
126 formed by reversing or adding numbers before and after each separate
127 component of the principal. This will catch passwords based on the
128 realm or components of the realm, which will often catch passwords
129 based on the name of the local institution.
131 The plugin now sets the Kerberos error message in the context to pass
132 error information, resulting in higher-quality error reporting in the
135 CrackLib checks for passwords where a character is a simple increment
136 or decrement of the previous character. In previous versions, the
137 embedded version of CrackLib allowed at most four such occurrences in
138 the entire password. This results in false positives on long
139 passphrases, since such accidental letter relationships aren't
140 uncommon in human languages. Change the embedded CrackLib to allow
141 one such simple increment for every three characters in the password,
142 which tightens the check somewhat for shorter passwords and loosens it
143 considerably for longer passwords.
145 Expect the Heimdal password strength checking plugin header in
146 kadm5/kadm5-pwcheck.h instead of outside of the kadm5 directory. This
147 is the path used by current versions of Heimdal. Drop support for
148 older versions of Heimdal that don't install this header file.
150 Update to rra-c-util 4.9:
152 * Probe for Kerberos headers using file checks instead of compiles.
153 * Improve probe for the Heimdal libroken library.
154 * Always build with large file support.
155 * Conditionally call AM_PROG_AR for portability to new Autotools.
157 Update to C TAP Harness 2.2:
159 * Allow more easily running single programs under tests/runtests.
160 * Flush the output from the test harness after each test.
162 krb5-strength 1.1 (2012-05-11)
164 Change the minimum password length in the embedded CrackLib to 8.
166 Reject passwords formed from the username portion of the principal
167 with digits appended.
169 In the embedded CrackLib, also check for a duplicated dictionary word.
171 Support linking with the system CrackLib instead of the embedded and
172 stricter copy by passing --with-cracklib to configure.
174 Fix variable sizes in the embedded CrackLib on 64-bit platforms. This
175 may fix interoperability problems with databases created on platforms
176 with a different native integer size. Thanks, Karl Lehnberger and
179 Stop using local in the test suite for portability to Solaris /bin/sh.
181 Update to rra-c-util 4.4:
183 * Use PATH_KRB5_CONFIG to override krb5-config location.
184 * Fix probing for ibm_svc/krb5_svc.h on AIX.
185 * Support Heimdal libraries without libroken, like OpenBSD.
186 * Fix manual Kerberos library probing without transitive dependencies.
187 * Support systems that only have krb5/krb5.h.
188 * Pass --deps to krb5-config in the non-reduced-dependencies case.
189 * Silence __attribute__ warnings on more compilers.
190 * Update warning flags for make warnings.
191 * Flesh out MAINTCLEANFILES to remove autogen results.
192 * Add notices to all files copied from rra-c-util.
194 Update to C TAP Harness 1.12:
196 * Drop is_double from the C TAP library to avoid requiring -lm.
197 * Avoid using local in the shell libtap.sh library.
198 * Silence __attribute__ warnings on more compilers.
199 * runtests now frees all allocated resources on exit.
200 * Fix runtests to still honor SOURCE and -s without BUILD and -b.
201 * Add tests/HOWTO documenting how to add new tests.
202 * Ensure correct output ordering in test results.
203 * Add -h and a better usage message to tests/runtests.
205 krb5-strength 1.0 (2010-02-16)
207 Add heimdal-strength, a program that checks password strength using
208 the protocol for a Heimdal external check program.
210 The shared module now also exports the interface expected by Heimdal's
211 dynamically loaded password strength checking API and can be used as a
212 Heimdal kadmin plugin.
214 Add a new plugin API for MIT Kerberos modelled after the plugin API
215 used for other MIT Kerberos plugins. Thanks to Marcus Watts for
216 substantial research and contributions to the interface design. This
217 work is incomplete in this release, missing the corresponding patch to
220 Fixed the data format written by the included packer program to add
221 enough nul bytes at the end of the data. Previously, there was not
222 enough trailing nul bytes for the expected input format, leading to
223 uninitialized memory reads in the password lookup.
225 Add a test suite using the driver and library from C TAP Harness 1.1.
227 Add portability code for platforms without a working snprintf or other
228 deficiencies and updated the code to take advantage of those
231 krb5-strength 0.5 (2007-07-18)
233 The check of the password against the principal checked against the
234 fully-qualified principal, which is not the usual problem.
235 Additionally check that the password doesn't match the principal with
236 the realm removed or the reverse of that (case-insensitive).
238 krb5-strength 0.4 (2007-03-28)
240 The patches directory was omitted from the distribution. Really
243 krb5-strength 0.3 (2007-03-23)
245 Initial public release. Includes a patch for MIT Kerberos, a slightly
246 modified version of CrackLib, and glue wrapped around CrackLib to make