SQL Anywhere Mobile - Mobilink ml_user table

Author

Mobilink ml_user table - is it possible to...

Dave Mawer

2005-05-11, 1:24 pm

Is it possible to:

1) Download the mobilink ml_user table to an ultralite table on a PDA
2) Convert the hashed_passwords for all users to ASCII on the device and
encrypt them myself.

The reason why I'm asking is that I have a login into my PDA app, which I
want to use the same
mobilink name and password so that I can authenticate and synchronise. I've
been told
that I can use authenticate_user_ha
shed event on a Connection script, but I
don't think this
will give me what I want.

I thought that when I do a sync with a specific script set such as admin,
this could download the
mobilink user names and passwords to the device, I can then check this
against what the
user types in as authentication to get into the application. Then
subsequently, I can use the
same user credentials to synchronise.

I hope somebody can help!

Greg Fenton

2005-05-12, 3:24 am

Dave Mawer wrote:
>
> The reason why I'm asking is that I have a login into my PDA app, which I
> want to use the same
> mobilink name and password so that I can authenticate and synchronise.

I suspect that you won't want to use the information in the ML_User
table for this purpose. There are a few reasons, but for one...how does
the user's password get reset at both the remote and the consolidated
should they forget it or whatever?

On top of that, you don't want to have all users downloaded to all
remotes. Realize that once a remote has synchronized with a given
"ml_username" (a.k.a. synchronization user), then that is the *only*
synch user that can be used on that remote unless you drop and recreate
the database [for the most part...there are some caveats around this but
mucking around with multiple synch users on a single remote is mucky].

And then there's the problem of the hashed passwords. The format of the
hash is not documented and is subject to change.

If you can outline your security and authentication requirements, likely
there'll be some people who will respond with their experiences.

greg.fenton
--
Greg Fenton
Consultant, Solution Services, iAnywhere Solutions
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