[jira] [Created] (ACCUMULO-4044) Stronger/standardized password hashing

["Christopher Tubbs (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Christopher Tubbs created ACCUMULO-4044:
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             Summary: Stronger/standardized password hashing
                 Key: ACCUMULO-4044
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACCUMULO-4044
             Project: Accumulo
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Christopher Tubbs
             Fix For: 1.8.0


Currently, Accumulo stores hashed passwords using SHA-256 and an 8-byte salt, in a custom output format.

Instead, we should switch to using commons-codec's Crypt class to create crypt(3) style hashes, the default of which is to use SHA-512 with a 16-byte salt. The format is stored in a standard way, with an identifier to determine the hashing method which was used.

We'd have to make sure that we can tell the difference between the new format and the old format, so we know how to properly verify user credentials. This would be easy if we stored the new form in a different zookeeper node, but we could also use a delimiter (not a fan of the delimiter, personally, because I'd prefer the standard format, unmodified). We might be able to automatically migrate to the new format upon authentication, so we can eventually drop the old format entirely*.

* When we do eventually drop the old format, users will need to reset their passwords, or have an admin user do it for them. This shouldn't be a big issue if we wait a sufficient number of releases to drop the old format.



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