DOVECOTPW

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (1)
Updated: 6 November 2008
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NAME

dovecotpw - a tool to easily generate passwords for a specified password scheme.

SYNOPSIS

dovecotpw [-l] [-p <password>] [-s <scheme>] [-u <user>] [-V]

DESCRIPTION

dovecotpw is a small tool to easily generate passwords for a specified password scheme known by dovecot(1). A password scheme means the format in which any password is stored in password databases.

The main idea behind storing passwords in non-plaintext scheme is that if an attacker gets access to your server, he can't easily just get all users' passwords and start using them. With stronger schemes it takes more time to crack the passwords.

Currently, the password schemes supported by dovecotpw are: CRYPT MD5 MD5-CRYPT SHA SHA1 SMD5 SSHA PLAIN CLEARTEXT CRAM-MD5 HMAC-MD5 DIGEST-MD5 PLAIN-MD4 PLAIN-MD5 LDAP-MD5 LANMAN NTLM RPA.

dovecotpw can be used to populate dovecot(1) password databases.

OPTIONS

-l: List known password schemes.
-p <password>: Use <password> as the password to be encoded with the specified scheme. If this option is not used, you are prompted for one interactively.
-s <scheme>: Specify the password scheme to be used to encrypt the password. <scheme> must be one of the supported password scheme as listed here above. If you omit this option, the default scheme is used (HMAC-MD5).
-u <user>: Specify the username. This can be needed by some schemes.
-V: Internally verify the generated hash.

AUTHOR

dovecotpw was written by Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>.

This manual page was written by Xavier Lüthi <xavier@caroxav.be>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).