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System Passwords
244
Red Hat Certificate System Administrator’s Guide • September 2005
System Passwords
CS has a password-quality checker for internal passwords that you can configure to your
needs. It stores token passwords in a plain text file, and stores all other passwords in an
encrypted password cache file.
Password-Quality Checker
CS comes with a plug-in, called
password-quality checker
, to monitor the quality of
passwords set within the CS system. All passwords used in CS are checked by the
password-quality checker, which by default checks that the length of a password is at least 8
characters long; there are no checks regarding which characters are valid or invalid. If you
use a password that doesn’t meet the quality rules, you will get an error message.
Note that CS enforces password quality on only those passwords that it creates and
manages. Passwords you enter for LDAP directory access are not subjected to quality
checks. The reason for this is, the password quality is handled by the system that creates and
manages the password. In an LDAP directory access, the remote directory that you
authenticate to enforces the quality of the password you used because it is created and
managed by the directory.
To enable you to customize the quality of passwords, the plug-in for the password-quality
checker is included as a sample in the CS SDK.
Passwords Stored by the Server
CS stores passwords in two separate files. These passwords are used to bind to servers, or to
unlock tokens when you start up the server.
Token Password Storage
The passwords for any tokens holding the private keys for the subsystem installed in this
instance of CS are stored in the file
password.conf
located in the
<server_root>/cert-<instance_id>/config
directory. This file has read/write
permission for the installer only.
This file contains the token passwords needed to open the private keys of the subsystem as
follows:
•
For a Certificate Manager the token password unlocks the private keys for the
Certificate Manager’s CA signing and SSL server
certificates. If the Certificate
Manager’s OCSP option was enabled during installation, then the password also
unlocks the private key for the Certificate Manager’s OCSP signing certificate.
Summary of Contents for CERTIFICATE 7.1 ADMINISTRATOR
Page 1: ...Administrator s Guide Red Hat Certificate System Version7 1 September 2005 ...
Page 22: ...22 Red Hat Certificate System Administrator s Guide September 2005 ...
Page 128: ...Cloning a CA 128 Red Hat Certificate System Administrator s Guide September 2005 ...
Page 368: ...ACL Reference 368 Red Hat Certificate System Administrator s Guide September 2005 ...
Page 460: ...Constraints Reference 460 Red Hat Certificate System Administrator s Guide September 2005 ...
Page 592: ...CRL Extension Reference 592 Red Hat Certificate System Administrator s Guide September 2005 ...