django-dynamic-password: dynamic password authentication for your web service

Attention! Only for really paranoid people as me.

The project code and bugtracker is hosted on Bitbucket and Github.

Introduction

django-dynamic-password is a django application which allow you to add dynamic password authentication for your web service.

How it works?

Verifies provided password according to DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN in your settings.py. You can also enable this feature only for STAFF users, see below.

You can format the value of your DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN according to: http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior

Some examples. Let's assume that today is September 29th, 2022, 8:01 (09-29-2022 8:01). Say your username is "admin" and password "s3kr3t", according to your DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN in settings.py you will have:

Case 1:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '<PASSWORD>%d'
only today valid password: s3kr3t29

Case 2:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '%d<PASSWORD>%H'
only this hour valid password: 29s3kr3t08

Case 3:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '%d<PASSWORD>%H-%M'
only this minute valid password: 29s3kr3t08-01

Installation

There are a few different ways to install dynamic_password:

Using pip

If you have pip install available on your system, just type:

pip install django-dynamic-password

If you've already got an old version of dynamic_password, and want to upgrade, use:

pip install -U django-dynamic-password

Installing from a directory

If you've obtained a copy of dynamic_password using either Mercurial or a downloadable archive, you'll need to install the copy you have system-wide. Try running:

python setup.py develop

If that fails, you don't have setuptools or an equivalent installed; either install them, or run:

python setup.py install

How to configure dynamic_password?

If you have already installed dynamic_password app, you must proceed with the configuration of your project.

Add dynamic_password to the INSTALLED_APPS

Once the dynamic_password is in your Python path, you need to modify the INSTALLED_APPS setting to include the dynamic_password module:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...,
    # Third-party
    'dynamic_password',
    # ...,
    )

Enable the custom authentication backend

To activate this backend you need at least put dynamic_password.backends. DynamicPasswordBackend line to the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS tuple:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (

'dynamic_password.backends.DynamicPasswordBackend', )

Set the DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN in your settings.py

Add this line to your settings.py:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '<PASSWORD>%m'

change it's value according to your needs. Some examples:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '<PASSWORD>%d'
DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '<PASSWORD>%m'
DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '%m<PASSWORD>%d'
DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_PATTERN = '%d<PASSWORD>%Y'

You can format this value according to: http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior

Optional: set DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_ONLY_STAFF

In order to enable dynamic_password only for staff users you can add this line to your settings.py:

DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_ONLY_STAFF = True

Future development plans

• Enable "per user" dynamic password, DYNAMIC_PASSWORD_USERS = ('user1', 'user2', )