[Dovecot] Password authentication and character set

[Fredrik Grönqvist]

18.11.2008 19:57, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> Ok, I see how this makes things problematic. One couldn't just encode it 
>> to UTF-8 anyway and do the comparison after that (provided there would 
>> be an option enabled)?
>>     
>
> You can encode everything to UTF-8, but the result will be different
> depending on what the source character set is. If by "option" you mean
> that you'd have a single setting that specifies which the "non-utf8
> charset" is that (hopefully) all your users are using, then sure that
> would be the a) choice in my previous reply.
>   
Yes, you're right. I suppose didn't think that through.
>   
>> So basically a password containing any non 7-bit ASCII is only "correct" 
>> when provided by a client using the same charset as the password is 
>> stored in...
>> If the RFC states that the password should be provided as 7-bit ASCII 
>> then I think I'll google for a reason why some clients send the password 
>> as something else.
>>     
>
> Most client programmers haven't even thought about the whole issue. The
> password is typically 7bit. So they just send the password using
> whatever charset that the OS by default happens to use.
>
> In your case you're most likely not really seeing ISO-8859-1 charset,
> but rather Windows-1252. Although Windows-1252 is a superset of
> ISO-8859-1, but things like euro character is present in 1252 but not in
> 8859-1 (and euro in a different position in 8859-15).
>   
Yes, I see. So in light of this and the conversation on the 
imap-protocol -list

http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2008-February/000822.html 


our current options seem to boil down to having the passwords ISO-8859-1 
encoded (given the demographics of our users).
Those using operating systems with native UTF-8 clients have to use 
passwords containing only 7-bit characters.

I didn't realise the specifications were so flexible on this password issue.

Chears, Fredrik

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