Passwords

PmWiki has built-in support for password-protecting various areas of the wiki site. Authors generally want to be able to apply passwords to individual pages or to WikiGroups. Wiki Administrators can apply passwords to individual pages, to WikiGroups, or to the entire wiki site. As with any access control system, the password protection mechanisms described here are only a small part of overall system and wiki security. PmWiki.Security? will contain a more thorough discussion of possible issues.

As an author editing pages...

You will generally use 3 types of passwords:

  1. to control who can see a page or group, use read passwords
  2. to control who can edit a page or group, use edit passwords
  3. to control who can alter the passwords used to protect a page or group, use attr passwords

Note that if an attr password isn't set, then anyone can alter the read and edit passwords. (See "security holes" below.)

To set a password on an individual wiki page, add ?action=attr to the page's URL (address) to access its attributes. (You may be prompted for a username and password; the username field usually isn't used by PmWiki.) Using the small form on the attributes page, you can set or clear the read, edit, or attr passwords on the page. In the form you enter the passwords as cleartext; PmWiki encrypts them for you automatically.

To set a password on a wiki group is slightly more difficult--you just set the passwords on a special page in each group called "GroupAttributes". You can get to the attributes page for GroupAttributes by entering a URL (address) like http://www.example.com/pmwiki?n=GroupName.GroupAttributes?action=attr. Then, using the small form on the attributes page, you can set or clear the read, edit, or attr passwords for the entire group. In the form you enter the passwords as cleartext; PmWiki encrypts them for you automatically.

As an administrator ...

You can set passwords on pages and groups exactly as described above for authors. You can also:

  1. set site-wide passwords for pages and groups that do not have passwords set
  2. use attr passwords to control who is able to set passwords on pages (and potentially other future attributes)
  3. use upload passwords to control access to the file upload capabilities (if uploads are enabled)
  4. use an admin password to override the passwords set for any individual page or group

For more information on password options available to administrators, see PmWiki.PasswordsAdmin.

Which password wins?

In PmWiki, page passwords override group passwords, group passwords override the default passwords, and the admin password overrides all passwords. This gives a great deal of flexibility in controlling access to wiki pages in PmWiki.

Security holes ...

Administrators need to carefully plan where passwords are applied to avoid opening inadvertent security holes. If your wiki is open (anyone can read and edit), this would not seem to be a concern, except, a malicious or confused user could apply a read password to a group and make the group completely unavailable to all other users. At the very least, even an open wiki should have a site-wide "admin" password and a site-wide "attr" password set in config.php. The sample-config.php file distributed with PmWiki indicates that the PmWiki and Main groups have "attr" locked by default, but if anyone creates a new group, "attr" is unlocked. Administrators must remember to set "attr" passwords for each new group (if desired) in this case. An easier solution is to include these lines in config.php : 

    $DefaultPasswords['admin'] = crypt('youradminpassword');
    $DefaultPasswords['attr'] = crypt('yourattrpassword');

This sets your "admin" and "attr" passwords and ensures that any new group will have this "attr" password automatically applied to it.

Protecting all the pages in a group except one

To protect all of the pages in a group from editing, enter a URL (address) like http://www.example.com/pmwiki?n=GroupName.GroupAttributes?action=attr. Then, use the small form on the attributes page to set an edit password for all pages in the group. To "unprotect" one page, you cannot simply "clear" the password for that page, because the page itself does not have a password - the group does. Enter a URL like http://www.example.com/pmwiki?n=GroupName.PageName?action=attr. Then, use the small form on the attributes page to set the edit password to the special value "nopass". This tells PmWiki to ignore any site-wide or group-level edit passwords that apply to the page. You can repeat this operation to unprotect other pages in the group.

Category: Passwords

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