France bans hashed passwords

    Not only in Russia, the government wants to completely control the privacy of its citizens, forbidding them to use services with strong encryption .

    The French also decided to take an extremely interesting step: to prohibit the storage of passwords in the form of hashes. In addition, services, whether it is an online store or a postal service, are now supposed to store all user data for 1 year. This data includes names, addresses, phone numbers and passwords.

    Naturally, the police, tax officials, customs officers and other “security agencies” get full access to this data.

    And all the fun begins from the moment Google, Facebook, eBay and other Internet services also have to store data in the clear, so as not to contradict French law. In fact, they have already sued to challenge such an original decision of the French government.

    Based on the Air Force (eng) .

    What does the habrasociety think?

    UPD1: there are many pluses, and leaked karma to a critical level :(

    UPD2: an important note from the user aGRa , which brings some clarity:


    Hmm. Yesterday, on the slashdot, everything was frayed ...

    In short: for any account, the service provider must keep certain data for a year after the account is closed. Among the data that must be stored, there is a "password, means to verify it." A couple of lines below the law says: "Such data should be stored only if they were collected."

    In other words:
    1. If the password was stored in clear text - it must be stored for a year after the account is closed.
    2. If only a password hash was stored (password verification tool), you need to keep a copy of this hash for a year.
    3. If no password has been used at all, nothing needs to be stored. During a year.

    So set aside the panic.

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