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Require a minimum password length at account creation
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Description

Author: elian

Description:
For security, passwords should be of reasonable length. Disallow empty and too
short passwords.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz621
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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to High.Nov 21 2014, 6:59 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz621.
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JoostMeerten wrote:

At the very *least* disallow blank passwords. A semi-secure password module
shouldn't be that hard to implement either (it has been done many times before).
When all users were equal, this didn't matter that much. Now that we have
admins, it does. We should be glad nobody with the required technical expertise
has desired to cause big problems for Wikipedia. That's no reason to remain
inactive.

I heard on #wikipedia that according to a survey by Tim, hundreds of users had
trivial passwords -- blank passwords, "password", "secret" and presumably the
age-old favorite <username> as well. It didn't say how many of these were
admins, and I don't care to guess.

User names are not secret. I could easily use anonymous proxies to hack as many
accounts as possible. Aside from the possibilities for vandalism, I could use
such accounts for all sorts of identity confusion. This would not be good for
the community.

tietew-mediazilla wrote:

In ja.wikipedia, an account with empty password was hijacked
and used to vandal.

At least, empty password MUST be denied ASAP.

(In reply to comment #2)

At least, empty password MUST be denied ASAP.

For your information:

I disallow empty passwords in the ENotif and EAuthent patch, which *is* in CVS
HEAD version (for 1.5 version). It does not yet check the length of the passwords.

(In reply to comment #4)

Fixed in CVS HEAD.

In r7317 specifically.

Related links:

  • [[mw:Manual:$wgMinimalPasswordLength]]
  • r48968