2 thoughts on - Password Algorithm With Authconfig Vs Authselect

• Once upon a time, Leon Fauster said:

  It looks like authselect doesn’t support that.

  While authconfig tried to be a super-multi-tool that knew how to configure all the things, I think it got to a point where it was too difficult to maintain (keeping track of which options were required, conflicted with each other, etc.). So authselect instead ships a pre-set group of config files that have been tested, with some options in them.

  Right now, the password algorithm is always sha512. I think that could be turned into what authselect calls a “feature”, but I’m not sure
  (that’d be a good request for the project, using their project page at https://github.com/authselect/authselect). It looks like features might support only enable/disable, not custom string values.

  The “officially correct” way to do that today seems to be to create a custom profile (which can be based on an existing profile), change the values, then apply the custom profile. This seems like a lot to just set the algorithm, but I’m guessing that at this point, there aren’t many requests to do that (so it isn’t a well-supported thing to change).

  It looks like something like this might do it:

  authselect create-profile sha256 –base-on=sssd
  sed -i ‘s/sha512/sha256/g’ /etc/authselect/custom/sha256/*
  authselect select custom/sha256

• Chris, this seems to be a very reasonable approach! Nevertheless I
  noticed while testing that these config files also need to be managed

  # grep 512 /etc/libuser.conf /etc/login.defs
  /etc/libuser.conf:crypt_style = sha512
  /etc/login.defs:ENCRYPT_METHOD SHA512

  At least authselect’s profile mechanism is a good starting point to adapt my workflow.

  Thanks!
  Leon