Re: Rejecting weak passwords

On 28 sep 2009, at 11.54, "Albe Laurenz" <laurenz.albe@wien.gv.at>  
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.
>
> Are there better ways?

Isn't there some library we can link with and (conditionally) use? I  
believe windows exposes api function(s) to let you verify password  
complexity - I'm sure there is something similar available on unix,  
hopefully included on most common platforms?

/Magnus