Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:21:25 +0100
From:      Nick Barnes <Nick.Barnes@pobox.com>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   telnet "SRA secure login" fails intermittently
Message-ID:  <23864.1027934485@thrush.ravenbrook.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
When I telnet into a FreeBSD box, I get this:

  $ telnet spong
  Trying 192.168.0.1...
  Connected to spong.my.domain
  Escape character is '^]'.
  Trying SRA secure login:
  User (nb): <user>
  Password: <password>

If I mistype the password, I get this:

  [ SRA login failed ]
  User (nb): <user>
  Password: <password>

And so on.  Fair enough.  But it has seemed to me that I have been
"mistyping my passwords" much more often since about 4.1: maybe 20% of
the time, as if somehow telnetd (or SRA, whatever that is) is getting
the password check wrong intermittently.  And If I fail a login the
first time, it seems harder to pass it the second time (the ~20%
failure rate goes up to maybe 50%).

Recently I have run some little checks on this.  Whenever I'm
telnetting in from an xterm, if the first login fails, I type my
password into another X app (so I can visually check it) and paste it
from ther.  Sometimes that login does also fail.  So there's something
wrong somewhere: xterm, telnetd, SRA (?).

Unless this is a security "feature"??

Nick B

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?23864.1027934485>