$Id: README,v 1.5 2004/04/07 09:42:48 ianmacd Exp $


WHAT IS IT?
-----------

Ruby/Password is a suite of password handling methods for Ruby. It supports
the manual entry of passwords from the keyboard in both buffered and
unbuffered modes, password strength checking, random password generation,
phonemic password generation (for easy memorisation by human-beings) and the
encryption of passwords.

The common CrackLib library is used to perform password strength checking.

From the CrackLib README:

  CrackLib makes literally hundreds of tests to determine whether you've
  chosen a bad password.

  * It tries to generate words from your username and GECOS entry and tries
    to match them against the password you've chosen.

  * It checks for simplistic patterns.

  * It then tries to reverse-engineer your password into a dictionary
    word, and searches for it in your dictionary.

  - after all that, it's PROBABLY a safe(-ish) password.  8-)


The target audience for this library is system administrators who need
to write Ruby programs that prompt for, generate, verify and encrypt
passwords.


INSTALLATION
------------

Please see the INSTALL file for details of how to install Ruby/Password.


USAGE
-----

Please see the RDoc documentation for details of how to use Ruby/Password.


LICENCE
-------

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.

Please see the file COPYING for the terms of the licence.

