Password is case sensitive now - Oracle 11g

Password is case sensitive now - Oracle 11g

Just to show an example:

SQL> create user test identified by AroRa default tablespace users;

User created.

SQL> grant create session to test;

Grant succeeded.

SQL> connect test/arora

ERROR:

ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

SQL> connect test/AroRa

Connected.

With 11g, Oracle has made significant changes in password maintenence algorithm.

The password verifier is based on 160 bit SHA-1 hashing algorithm. This empowers Oracle to not only allow case sensitive passwords, but also enable the users to keep a strong password that can include special characters.

For pre-11g users, when they migrate to 11g, their password still behave password insensitive. However, i feel its good to take the advantage of this useful feature and change the password.

For applications which cant afford to change their passwords for xyzee purpose, Oracle has supplied an init.ora i.e. SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON that can be set to true/false.

Default value of this parameter is true which means passwords should be case sensitive.