Fossil

<title>Fossil Password Management</title>
<h1 align="center">Password Management</h1>

Fossil handles user authentication using passwords.
Passwords are unique to each repository.  Passwords are not part of the
persistent state of a project.  Passwords are not versioned and
are not transmitted from one repository to another during a sync.
Passwords are local configuration information that can (and usually does)
vary from one repository to the next within the same project.

Passwords are stored in the PW field of the USER table.
In older versions of Fossil (prior to 
[/timeline?c=2010-01-10+20:56:30 | 2010-01-11]) the password 
is stored as cleartext.  In newer versions of Fossil, the password
can be either cleartext or an SHA1 hash (written as a 40-character
lower-case hexadecimal number).  If the USER.PW field contains
a 40-character string, that string is assumed to be a SHA1 hash.
If the size of USER.PW is anything other than 40 characters, then
it is understood as a plain-text password.

</blockquote>

That hash value is "f1b699cc9af3eeb98e5de244ca7802ae38e77bae".  Note
that by including the project-code and the login as part of the hash,
a different USER.PW value results even if two or more users on the
repository select the same "asdfg" password or if user alice reuses the
same password on multiple projects.

Whenever a password is changed using the web interface or using the
"user" command-line method, the new password is stored using the SHA1
encoding.  Thus, cleartext passwords will gradually migrate to become
SHA1 passwords.  All remaining cleartext passwords can be converted to
SHA1 passwords using the following command:

<blockquote><pre>
fossil test-hash-passwords <i>REPOSITORY-NAME</i>
</pre></blockquote>

Remember that converting from cleartext to SHA1 passwords is an
irreversible operation.

The only way to insert a new cleartext password into the USER table
is to do so manually using SQL commands.  For example:

<blockquote><pre>
UPDATE user SET pw='asdfg' WHERE login='alice';
</pre></blockquote>

<h2>Web Interface Authtentication</h2>

When a user logs into Fossil using the web interface, the login name
and password are sent in the clear to the server.  The server then
hashes the password and compares it against the value stored in USER.PW.
If they match, the server sets a cookie on the client to record the

Using this approach, the USER.PW value is treated as a shared secret
between the client and server.  The USER.PW value is never sent over
the wire, but the protocol establishes that both client and server know
the value of USER.PW.  Furthermore, the use of a SHA1 hash over the entire
message prevents an attacker from sniffing a valid login from a legitimate
users and then replaying the message modified content.

If the USER.PW on the server holds a cleartext password, then the
server will also accept a login-card signature that is constructed
using either the cleartext password or the SHA1 hash of the password.
This means that when USER.PW holds a cleartext password, the login card
will work for both older and newer clients.  If the USER.PW on the server
only holds the SHA1 hash of the password, then only newer clients will be
able to authenticate to the server.

The client normally gets the login and password from the "remote URL".

<blockquote><pre>
http://<font color="blue">login:password</font>@servername.org/path
</pre></blockquote>

For older clients, the password is used for the shared secret as stated
in the URL and with no encoding.  
For newer clients, the shared secret is derived from the password 
by transformed the password using the SHA1 hash encoding
described above.  However, if the first character of the password is
"*" (ASCII 0x2a) then the "*" is skipped and the rest of the password
is used directly as the share secret without the SHA1 encoding.

<blockquote><pre>
http://<font color="blue">login:*password</font>@servername.org/path
</pre></blockquote>

This *-before-the-password trick can be used by newer clients to
sync against a legacy server that does not understand the new SHA1
password encoding.