[p4] long passwords

[Matt Craighead]

FYI, P4 support has confirmed that 32-character passwords are treated as a
special case.  If a password is exactly 32 characters, it is treated as a
special case and passed as a ticket without truncation.  Otherwise, if it
longer than 16 and not exactly 32, it is truncated to 16.

The p4api takes care of this truncation for me on non-Unicode servers; I
guess I have to replicate that logic in my own code for Unicode servers.
Odd, but should work.

I'd be a little concerned if this limitation/bug was "fixed", since this
would break existing long passwords.  I've run into similar issues on Unix
systems that were "fixed" to support longer than 8 character passwords: all
of the sudden I had to start typing only the first 8 characters of my
password to be able to log in.

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Tony Andrew Kennah
<tonykennah at hotmail.com>wrote:

> Matt - Thats correct, passwords are truncated to 16 characters, I've logged
> a job with Perforce about this one.
>
> tk
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Craighead" <
> matt.craighead at conifersystems.com>
> To: <perforce-user at perforce.com>
> Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:50 PM
> Subject: [p4] long passwords
>
>
>   Some experiments I've just run seem to suggest that Perforce truncates
>> passwords longer than 16 characters back down to 16 characters before
>> storing or comparing them.  Is this correct?  I don't see anything in
>> either
>> the user or administrator docs talking about a maximum password length.
>>
>> I can put in whatever garbage I want after those first 16 characters in
>> the
>> password, and it doesn't seem to make a difference.
>>
>> Note: this does *not* apply to tickets, where all 32 hex digits appear to
>> be significant (and in fact even changing uppercase to lowercase hex
>> digits
>> will give you an error).
>>
>> I'm also seeing some particularly unusual behavior with >16 character
>> passwords via the p4api, but I haven't entirely figured out what is going
>> on
>> yet, so I'll refrain from speculating as to what the issue is.
>>
>> --
>> Matt Craighead
>> Founder/CEO, Conifer Systems LLC
>> http://www.conifersystems.com
>> 512-772-1834
>> _______________________________________________
>> perforce-user mailing list  -  perforce-user at perforce.com
>> http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
>>
>>
>


-- 
Matt Craighead
Founder/CEO, Conifer Systems LLC
http://www.conifersystems.com
512-772-1834