Password Recovery without sending password via email
- by Brian
So, I've been playing with asp:PasswordRecovery and discovered I really don't like it, for several reasons:
1) Alice's password can be reset even without having access to Alice's email. A security question for password resets mitigates this, but does not really satisfy me.
2) Alice's new password is sent back to her in cleartext. I would rather send her a special link to my page (e.g. a page like example.com/recovery.aspx?P=lfaj0831uefjc), which would let her change her password.
I imagine I could do this myself by creating some sort of table of expiring password recovery pages and sending those pages to users who asked for a reset. Somehow those pages could also change user passwords behind the scenes (e.g. by resetting them manually and then using the text of the new password to change the password, since a password cannot be changed without knowing the old one). I'm sure others have had this problem before and that kind of solution strikes me as a little hacky. Is there a better way to do this?
An ideal solution does not violate encapsulation by accessing the database directly but instead uses the existing stored procedures within the database...though that may not be possible.
