Is there a valid case for an empty password?

[Greg Hudson]

On 10/11/2018 11:19 PM, Weijun Wang wrote:
> We are planning to disallow empty passwords for PBKDF2 in JDK. However, some years ago I did receive a bug report to support empty passwords on Windows 200x. Is it really a valid password?

RFC 3961 says (about string-to-key) "all valid UTF-8 strings should be 
allowed" and doesn't say anything about a minimum length.

MIT krb5 had a bug where empty passwords wouldn't work via the API (but 
would work via the prompter).  We fixed it in 1.12:

     http://mv.ezproxy.com.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=7642

The fix was prompted by Fedora bug reports such as:

     https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=960001

Of course there is basically no security value to a key derived from an 
empty password.  But I guess there have been some use cases anyway.