topic Re: Sas Internal account password including special characters in Administration and Deployment

Sas Internal account password including special characters

japsas100 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 03:13:52 GMT

Hello,

Can we use below special characters in sas internal account password (sastrust,sasdm,sasevs)?

Like &@$:;_%^

I have used these special characters in password but getting the unauthorized user password error when I run proc http.

We are using the 9.4 M1 and also tried the degug with sas configuration file but no luck.

I have also opened the SAS Track.

Please advise?

Re: Sas Internal account password including special characters

japelin — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:06:45 GMT

Excuse me, but have you been able to isolate whether it is really a problem with the password string, or with your sas account, or with the site you are trying to access with proc http?

If it is a problem with the special symbols in the password, are you double coating the password when specifying it in proc http? Why don't you use single quotation marks?
Use single quotation marks when you don't want to expand or reference a macro.

Re: Sas Internal account password including special characters

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:48:57 GMT

My instinct(!) tells me to not use these characters in particular:

%&?;:/

as they have special meaning within the HTTP protocol. I would also refrain from using quotes, as that makes handling such strings in any programming environment harder.

Since these are for internal, technical users of the SAS system, why do you need to use them in PROC HTTP? I never accessed these users with anything but the SAS Management Console.

Note that a random 8-character password consisting of upper/lowercase letters, digits and underlines will provide so many permutations (63**8) that brute-forcing it with 1000 tries per second would still take close to 8000 years.

Re: Sas Internal account password including special characters

gwootton — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:37:17 GMT

You probably need to URL encode the password. For example:

1 %let pass=%nrstr(&@$:;_%^);
2 %let pass=%sysfunc(urlencode(&pass));
3 %put &pass;
%26@$%3A%3B_%25%5E

Re: Sas Internal account password including special characters

Sajid01 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 12:41:33 GMT

Hello @japsas100
No reason why one should not. But better keep the level of complexity manageable.