mradestock

Just to clarify, the attack you want to protect against is that of an adversary being able to conclude the DH public key exchange with a bona fide weave peer, despite having no knowledge of the password. Correct?

But what can an adversary learn from doing so? All subsequent messages on the connection are encrypted with the secret key, which has the password mixed in.

I don't think that feature ever existed.

Though a representation in a particular character set does not prevent the password from being strong.

> All of the privacy and integrity you could produce with the system described is what comes from the password.

That is correct. I guess calling this a 'password' is perhaps misleading in our docs, since it could be seen as implying human-readability and cryptographic weakness. As msackman says, the 'password' can in fact be as strong as you like.

> "they do not use a password hashing function"

From the weave crypto docs at http://weaveworks.github.io/weave/how-it-works.html#crypto:

"The public key from the remote peer is combined with the private key for the local peer in the usual Diffie-Hellman way, resulting in both peers arriving at the same shared key. To this is appended the supplied password, and the result is hashed through SHA256, to form the final ephemeral session key."

Disclaimer: I work on Weave.