Re: Rejecting weak passwords

Albe Laurenz wrote:
> Dear hackers,
>
> I have been thinking about ways to have PostgreSQL reject
> weak passwords.
>
> I think the standard recommendation is "use PAM and LDAP",
> but that requires the user to change the password outside
> of PostgreSQL. And who would want to setup and maintain an
> LDAP server just for this?
>
> Since everybody has different ideas what is a good password,
> there should be some way to configure that. I've looked at
> how Oracle does it, and they simply let you write a
> stored procedure that throws an exception if it doesn't
> like the password.
> Since users are on cluster level and functions live in
> databases, that won't work in PostgreSQL.
>
> I have come up with an idea or two and like to hear your
> opinion.
>
> 1) One could have a set of GUCs like min_password_length,
>    min_password_nonchars and similar that everybody
>    could configure. This is not extremely flexible though.
> 2) Another idea would be a GUC that contains a regular
>    expression that a password may *not* match.
>    Perhaps that's too limiting too.
> 3) I have also considered a GUC that points to a loadable
>    module that performs the password check if set.
>
>
>   

My vote is for #3, if anything.

cheers

andrew