| Description: |
Ruby/Password comprises a set of useful methods for creating, verifying and manipulating passwords. It includes an interface to CrackLib, a library commonly used for checking password strength.
The target audience for this library is system administrators who need to write Ruby programs that prompt for, generate, verify and encrypt passwords.
Changes in 0.5.2:
The build environment has been modified to search for the system dictionary in the additional location of /var/cache/cracklib/cracklib_dict.pwd, which is where it is on Debian Linux.
Changes in 0.5.1:
Password.get would throw an exception in the unlikely event that STDIN reached EOF without any input.
pwgen now supports a -v or --version switch.
Changes in 0.5.0:
This is a major update. The user-visible changes between this version and the
previous, 0.4.1, are as follows:
A new example program, pwgen, has been added, complete with man page. Ted
Ts'o's C program of the same name inspired this Ruby version. The man page is
also adapted from his.
A new class method, Password.phonemic, generates phonemic passwords. This,
too, was inspired by Ted Ts'o's work on pwgen. As its second parameter, it can
take zero or more new constants, logically OR'ed together. Available constants
are Password::ONE_DIGIT and Password::ONE_CASE. The former specifies that the
generated password should contain at least one digit, whilst the latter
specifies that the password should contain at least one capital letter.
The old Password.random method has been renamed Password.urandom and replaced
by a new Password.random that does not depend on /dev/urandom, making it much
more portable. Password.urandom will return nil on platforms that do not
implement the /dev/urandom device.
Password.get will now detect whether STDIN is connected to a tty. If not, no
password prompt is displayed and no attempt will be made to manipulate
terminal echo.
The prompt parameter to Password.get and Password.getc must now be passed in
its entirety. Previously, the string ': ' would be automatically appended to
the user-supplied prompt, but this behaviour has been changed in order to
accommodate null prompts. The default string for the prompt parameter has been
changed accordingly.
Running password.rb directly will now result in a call to Password.phonemic
and the display of the resulting password.
The Password::BadDictionary exception has been renamed
Password::DictionaryError and made a subclass of StandardError instead of
RuntimeError.
The CryptError exception has been moved to Password::CryptError and is now a
subclass of StandardError instead of RuntimeError.
A new constant, PASSWD_CHARS, gives the list of characters from which
automatically generated passwords will be chosen. Note that Password.urandom
will use the additional characters '+' and '/'.
A new constant, SALT_CHARS, gives the list of characters valid as salt
characters when invoking Password#crypt.
Password.getc now returns an instance of Password, not String.
Password.random now returns a Password, not a String.
A Password::CryptError exception is now raised if the salt passed to
Password#crypt contains a bad character.
RDoc documentation has been added. The INSTALL file explains how to build it.
The RD documentation has been removed in favour of the RDoc documentation.
Changes in 0.4.1:
A warning issued when the library was loaded into Ruby 1.8.x is now avoided.
Changes in 0.4.0:
When a bad dictionary path is provided to Password#check, a Password::BadDictionary exception is now raised. In addition, buffering is now turned off for the Password.getc method, as this resulted in the prompt sometimes not being displayed when called by Ruby 1.8
Changes in 0.3.0:
The Crack class is gone and Password is now a direct subclass of String. Methods previously available in the Crack class are now accessible directly from the Password class.
As a result of this change, Password#check now raises a Password::WeakPassword exception if the password is weak, not a Crack::WeakPassword exception.
Changes in 0.2.1:
There are no user-visible changes to the code base in this release. The only changes are portability enhancements to the build system.
Changes in 0.2.0:
Password#check now returns true on success, and raises a Crack::WeakPassword exception on failure.
Changes in 0.1.1:
Password.get now returns an instance of class Password, not String
Password.new now defaults to returning a null string, rather than nil
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