Including pam_faildelay module in PAM distribution/possible security problem

Bjoern Voigt bjoern at cs.tu-berlin.de
Sun Nov 12 22:03:36 UTC 2006


Bjoern Voigt wrote:
>   3. I don't like the hardcoded "sleep" function very much. This is
>      especially problematic within GUI programs. A GUI program can not
>      react events if it wait's for PAM. Ideally an application could
>      register a custom wait/sleep callback function. Unfortunately such
>      a new callback would not help to secure unmodified programs.
After looking at the manual page for "pam_fail_delay" and the source 
code more deeply, I saw, that we already have such faildelay callback 
functions.

An application programmer could write log entries about failed logins 
within this callback function before sleeping to avoid the security 
problem. But does such a solution match the design principles of PAM?

Greetings, Björn




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