Some time ago, a user of one of my sites asked me what was his password for the site, and my reply was: "click here to change your password".
He was annoyed by this answer. He expected me to tell him "your password is...", so I had to do some public relations and explain him:
1 - I was teaching him how to do things by himself, which is much more valuable.
2 - I didn't know his password. I didn't know the password of any user.
The second point sounds strange but it's true. Your password is a very sensitive information and we know that here at ImpressCMS, so we "hide" it in a way that no-one, even the owner of a site, can access any other person's password directly.
What's the danger?
Consider a site that doesn't protect your password properly. A hacker gains access to the site. He gets all user data, including their passwords, of 5,000 people. Of all these people, 100 have a Paypal account, and 20 of them are using the same password for both the hacked site and Paypal. 15 of them have cash on their accounts.
They are screwed.
No, we're not allowing this to happen in a ImpressCMS site if possible.
What's the trick?
ImpressCMS encrypts the password before saving it in the database, so the database doesn't contain your password, only the encrypted version. The wonder of our encrypting method is that is easy to encrypt anything using it, but it's terribly hard to decrypt it.
So, when you login in your site, we don't compare the password you wrote with the one we have, because we don't have any. We encrypt the password again and compare it with the encrypted version we have in the database. That's how we know you are really you, but we don't save your password anywhere.
Am I safe?
On ImpressCMS, you're as safe as we can guarantee. To be honest, we're not the only Open Source CMS that takes special care of your password, but this is actually good news. The Open Source community, despite working on free products, takes your personal data very seriously. More seriouly, by the way, than some big fat NASDAQ corporations. If you ever suffered phone SPAM or receive calls everyday from a phone company that its not yours (it happens to me), you know what i'm talking about.
What I can tell you is that ImpressCMS developers have run "the extra mile" to offer safer encryption methods for your password. In version 1.1 we moved from old MD5 to other, much safer, methods, such as SHA.
And if time proves this is not enough, we're ready to run the extra mile again.
Best regards.
