What characters can be used in an CA-ACF2 user password?

Products

• ACF2
• ACF2 - DB2 Option
• ACF2 for zVM
• ACF2 - z/OS
• ACF2 - MISC
• PanApt
• PanAudit

Issue/Introduction

Description

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

Solution

For CA-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 CA-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 CA 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, you would set PSWD-UPP 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 CA-ACF2 Administrator Guide, Chapter 14, the PSWD record, and especially the section on "Considerations for Mixed Case Passwords".

Environment

Release:
Component: ACF2MS