[freeside] Password Length

[ivan]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 02:44:55PM -0700, Jason Spence wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 12:20:29PM -0700, rdailey at colusanet.com developed
> a new theory of relativity and: 
> 
> > Why is the maximum password length only eight characters?  I
> > understand that Unix only uses the first eight characters, anyways,
> > but what about RADIUS?
> 
> RADIUS has a limit of 128 characters.  See section 5.2 of RFC 2138.
> 
> The 8 character bottleneck comes from BSD systems, I think.  I know
> that in the past, they only treated the first 8 characters as
> significant, but I'm not sure whether that is still true now that
> they're using MD5.

Historically, not just BSD systems, but all unices, whether BSD-flavoured,
SysV-flavoured (Solaris etc.) or independantly implemented (Linux), have
used a DES-flavoured crypt(3) with 8 significant characters.

-- 
meow
_ivan