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    <p>Imagine someone has commissioned a large building to be built - a bar, let's say - and the following conversation takes place:</p> <p><strong>Architect:</strong> <em>For a building of this size and capacity, you will need fire exits here, here, and here.</em><br> <strong>Client:</strong> <em>No, that's too complicated and expensive to maintain, I don't want any side doors or back doors.</em><br> <strong>Architect:</strong> <em>Sir, fire exits are not optional, they are required as per the city's fire code.</em><br> <strong>Client:</strong> <em>I'm not paying you to argue. Just do what I asked.</em></p> <p>Does the architect then ask how to ethically build this building without fire exits?</p> <p>In the building and engineering industry, the conversation is most likely to end like this:</p> <p><strong>Architect:</strong> <em>This building cannot be built without fire exits. You can go to any other licensed professional and he will tell you the same thing. I'm leaving now; call me back when you are ready to cooperate.</em></p> <p>Computer programming may not be a <em>licensed</em> profession, but people often seem to wonder why our profession doesn't get the same respect as a civil or mechanical engineer - well, look no further. Those professions, when handed garbage (or outright dangerous) requirements, will simply refuse. They know it is not an excuse to say, "well, I did my best, but he insisted, and I've gotta do what he says." They could lose their license for that excuse.</p> <p>I don't know whether or not you or your clients are part of any publicly-traded company, but storing passwords in any recoverable form would cause you to to fail several different types of security audits. The issue is not how difficult it would be for some "hacker" who got access to your database to recover the passwords. <strong>The vast majority of security threats are internal.</strong> What you need to protect against is some disgruntled employee walking off with all the passwords and selling them to the highest bidder. Using asymmetrical encryption and storing the private key in a separate database does absolutely nothing to prevent this scenario; there's always going to be <em>someone</em> with access to the private database, and that's a serious security risk.</p> <p><strong>There is no ethical or responsible way to store passwords in a recoverable form. Period.</strong></p>
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    1. POHow should I ethically approach user password storage for later plaintext retrieval?
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    1. CO@Aaronaught - I think that is a fair and valid point, but let me twist that on you. You are working on a project for a company as an employee and your boss says 'this is a requirement of our system' (for whatever reason). Do you walk off the job full of righteous indignation? I know that there is an obligation when I am in full control to be responsible--but if a company chooses to risk failure of audits or liability then is it my duty to sacrifice my job to prove a point, or do I seek the BEST and SAFEST way to do what they say? Just playing devil's advocate..
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    2. CO@Shane: I suppose it depends whether or not you consider yourself a professional. Professionals have an obligation to uphold certain standards whether they are "in control" or not. I am not saying I would storm out of the office and never come back, but my response to that would be, *"No, it is **not** a requirement of your system, not anymore."* Let me twist this back on you - if your employer asked you to start taking registration passwords and use them to attempt to hijack the registered e-mail addresses for spam, would you do it?
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    3. COOf course not, and if I knew of anyone who was doing so I would take them down. I don't find that to be a 1 to 1 comparison though--there is a difference between defending against possible security breaches and exploiting them myself. Even though I think we are philosophically getting a little far afield from the question, with your statement here I feel like I should suppose that any website asking for my username and password without an SSL certificate is just as evil as someone who has just hacked my email account because they have allowed for the possibility of sniffing my credentials?
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