Allowed characters in an ACF2 user password

Products

• ACF2
• ACF2 - z/OS
• ACF2 - MISC

Issue/Introduction

The list of permissible characters in a user password has expanded over recent releases of ACF2. What characters are now valid in a password?

Resolution

For ACF2 the default password character set contains 0-9, A-Z (upper case), and special characters #, @ and $ (referred to as national characters). The PSWDPLST parameter of the GSO PSWD record can be used to specify up to twelve additional special characters that are supported by ACF2. These characters are the asterisk(*), ampersand(&), not sign(?), colon(:), equal sign(=), hyphen(-), exclamation point(!), period(.), percent sign(%), question mark(?), underscore(_), and vertical line(|).

The PSWDMIXD parameter allows the use of lower case a-z characters, but before setting PSWDMIXD, you must ensure that all applications that perform password validation can support mixed-case passwords. Some applications may upper-case the password before it is passed to ACF2. If an application does not support mixed-case password validation and PSWDMIXD is on, then the users of that application must use upper-case passwords. To turn off PSWDMIXD for individual userids, PSWD-UPP can be set in the logonid record to specify for this user new passwords are upper-case only and are not case-sensitive.

For more information on the PSWDPLST and PSWDMIXD parameters, consult the ACF2 documentation section Password Maintenance and Support (PSWD).