Hello,

Yes - with hashed passwords, passwords are never retrievable... but I don't understand in any way why that's a bad thing. Why would I ever want to actually retrieve a password? Instead, it's always best to reset the password and force the user to change their password when they log in with the temporary.

If passwords are ever retrievable, I assume that anybody with sufficient access to the server can retrieve all passwords. That's crazy to me. Second, I can't really think of a user scenario where I'd want to retrieve their password. DotNetNuke emails passwords in plain test - this seems crazy - I can't think why I'd ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, want to email somebody their password. How do I know how secure their email client is? How do I know somebody isn't sitting on their network reading email because they aren't using SSL?

The only circumstance would be to have the user with the forgotten password validate themselves through some other process and then have the website display their password to them... But, why go through all this trouble when I can just do a simple password reset?

Again, there might be circumstances where encrypted passwords make sense - so it should be an option. I have not yet seen any argument that made any sense at all for why it should be the default. I think DNN is just encouraging bad password security because people who don't know better assume it's a convenience.

I know that's a little harsh, but I just hate the idea that passwords could be recoverable by any person with sufficient access.

Mike