Change a user’s Perforce password.

p4 [g-opts] passwd [-O oldpassword] [-P newpassword] [user]

By default, user records are created without passwords, and any Perforce user can impersonate another by setting P4USER or by using the globally-available -u option. To prevent another user from impersonating you, use p4 passwd to set your password.

After you have set a password, you can authenticate with the password by providing it whenever in one of three ways:

Each of these three methods overrides the methods above it. Some of these methods may not be permitted depending on the security level configured for your installation.

For Perforce applications on Windows and OS X that connect to Perforce services at security levels 0 and 1, p4 passwd stores the password by using p4 set to store the MD5 hash of the password in the registry or system settings. When connecting to Perforce services at security levels 2, 3, or 4, password hashes are neither stored in, nor read from, these locations.

You can improve security by using ticket-based authentication instead of password-based authentication. To authenticate with tickets instead of passwords, first set a password with p4 passwd, and then use the p4 login and p4 logout commands to manage your authentication.

You can further improve security by assigning users to groups and setting the PasswordTimeout: field in the p4 group form. If a user belongs to more than one group, the largest PasswordTimeout value applies.

Perforce superusers can reset the passwords of individual users (or all users site-wide) with the p4 admin resetpassword command. You can also set the dm.user.resetpassword configurable (set with p4 configure) to require that any newly-created users reset the password you assigned them when you created their account.

For more about how user authentication works, see the Helix Versioning Engine Administrator Guide: Fundamentals.

Certain combinations of security level and Perforce applications releases require users to set "strong" passwords. A password is considered strong if it is at least dm.password.minlength (by default, eight characters) long, and at least two of the following are true:

For example, the passwords a1b2c3d4, A1B2C3D4, aBcDeFgH are (by default) considered strong. For information about how higher security levels work, see the Helix Versioning Engine Administrator Guide: Fundamentals.