Re: [office] Proper identifier for Excel-style digest algorithm

[Kohei Yoshida <kyoshida@novell.com>]

Hello Bob,

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 00:43 +0200, Bob Jolliffe wrote:
> But it does give rise to the question: are we going to support saving
> passwords hashed using iso-29500-legacy-hash in odf v1.2?  Currently I
> guess we do as we leave the choice of algorithm completely open.  Its
> a tricky one.  I would suggest that applications, such as openoffice,
> should be free to implement the algorithm for reading and writing .xls
> or .doc files, but I would strongly discourage its use in odf files.

Understood.

Just to clarify on this point.  It is not our intention to have
OpenOffice aggressively use a password hash generated by Excel's legacy
hashing algorithm in ODF unless there is no other options.  One such
case is when opening an xls file that already has a password hash (for a
protected worksheet, document structure etc), and saving it immediately
as ODF.  At that point, all that is available is the xls-legacy hash
value, so we'd have no choice but to save it in ODF.  If the user ever
re-types or changes the password, then we would generate a new hash
using a recommended hash algorithm (SHA1 or better).

In other words, we are doing this only to deal with legacy documents.
So, rest assured. :-)

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida - OpenOffice.org Engineer - Novell, Inc.
<kyoshida@novell.com>