Security

Security

It's important you spend some time understanding the different settings you can modify to protected your wiki.

Superadmin account

XWiki provides a superadmin account. It is special, because:

• It is not stored in the database
• It cannot be modified in any way
• It always has full access, regardless of the rights settings

By default, this account is disabled. To enable it, you have to edit <xwiki-dir>/WEB-INF/xwiki.cfg, uncomment the xwiki.superadminpassword=system line and set a proper password. To disable it, just comment this line. Remember to restart the servlet container after changing xwiki.cfg.

Cookie Encryption Keys

When a user chooses to be remembered when he logs in, a cookie is saved on his machine. The cookie is encrypted so that nobody having access to it can see the username/password. This encryption is done using 2 configuration parameters located in the xwiki.cfg configuration file. This file is located in WEB-INF/ in the XWiki WAR (see the Installation for where it's installed).

It's important you edit the xwiki.cfg file to modify the cookie authentication and encryption keys as they use default values when you install XWiki and these predefined values could be used by an attacker to decode the username/password. To prevent this change the following 2 configuration parameters:

• xwiki.authentication.validationKey
• xwiki.authentication.encryptionKey