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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
commit841785bad14dfad81a0af94900310141c59f26a4 (patch)
tree9fba8a7c16596dcb9652576f9322c810eb0cf682 /manual/socket.texi
parent6ab902e4decd89c1a9206497d14ddba7680bfc37 (diff)
downloadglibc-841785bad14dfad81a0af94900310141c59f26a4.tar.gz
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/socket.texi')
-rw-r--r--manual/socket.texi4
1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/manual/socket.texi b/manual/socket.texi
index 79eb4208be..a6c44b77c3 100644
--- a/manual/socket.texi
+++ b/manual/socket.texi
@@ -257,7 +257,7 @@ system assigns an address automatically if you have not specified one.
Occasionally a client needs to specify an address because the server
discriminates based on address; for example, the rsh and rlogin
-protocols look at the client's socket address and only bypass password
+protocols look at the client's socket address and only bypass passphrase
checking if it is less than @code{IPPORT_RESERVED} (@pxref{Ports}).
The details of socket addresses vary depending on what namespace you are
@@ -3277,7 +3277,7 @@ or request that comes in. If @var{style} uses connections, then
@var{user} is the user name that the server should run as. @code{inetd} runs
as root, so it can set the user ID of its children arbitrarily. It's
best to avoid using @samp{root} for @var{user} if you can; but some
-servers, such as Telnet and FTP, read a username and password
+servers, such as Telnet and FTP, read a username and passphrase
themselves. These servers need to be root initially so they can log
in as commanded by the data coming over the network.