Re: Fwd: Password leaks are security holes

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Mark Brown wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 01:05:19PM +0200, Johan Walles wrote:
> > 2008/8/28 Giacomo A. Catenazzi <cate@debian.org>:
>
> > > auth.log was invented for this reason, and separated to standard log:
> > > it should be readable only by root, because users do errors.
>
> > It's readable by anybody with physical access to the hardware.
>
> > Hard disks get stolen all the time [1], and on publicly accessible
> > machines it's often possible to boot in runlevel 1 or from something
> > other than the hard disk and access any files you like.  That's why
> > the passwords in /etc/shadow are all hashed, rather than just being
> > chmodded.

As alternative, you could redirect "auth" syslogd to /dev/null
(or to a pipe that filter results).

Note that the important data are still available in 'last'
(wtmp, btmp).

But I don't think that on normal cases (which sould be the
Debian default) the security is decreased having misstyped
password on auth.log

ciao
	cate