Moodle 1.8.11 release notes

Release date: Not yet released

Security issues

This release contains a lot of security and privacy fixes related to the handling of user data and passwords in Moodle backups, MDL-20851. (Note that MDL-20851 and all the following security issues currently have a security level setting which restricts access).

• MDL-20838 Hashed user passwords are no longer saved in backup files containing user data.

If anyone really needs passwords to be saved (in rare case of restoring a backup with user data to a different site) $CFG->includeuserpasswordsinbackups may be added to config.php.

• MDL-18807 To greatly reduce the risk of password theft, a password salt is set in config.php when installing 1.8.11 and for upgrades, a notification message strongly recommends admins to set a password salt. In addition, the security overview report gives a warning if no password salt has been set.
• MDL-20853 To protect sites from old backups that are not accessible to Moodle, after upgrading to 1.9.7, admins are prompted to change their password on next login.

More issues to be listed soon...