Like I've already mentioned in my reply to Aki, I generally agree, but
many of these methods require much time and expertise some bad guys
don't have. You can also bruteforce the passwords but it can take years.
With passwords showing in logs all they need to do is make a few clicks
and enable auth logging. In most cases the attacker is really short on
time and needs to act fast, before he is detected and locked out of the
system.
On 2022-10-09 19:10, Bernardo Reino wrote:
On Sun, 9 Oct 2022, Serveria Support wrote:
So this means passwords cannot be masked/hidden in the logs? You
realize that it actually defeats the whole idea of encrypted storage?
It's useless. I can think of lots of scenarios: malicious system
administrator reading users mails and blackmailing them or selling
their business secrets to competitors, corrupt law enforcement in some
countries getting rid of political or business opponents by disclosing
the contents of their mails and I can go on and on and on... There is
no such thing as semi-privacy. Privacy is either there or it's not.
If your attack scenario includes somebody owning your server, nothing
prevents them from compiling/installing a custom version of dovecot
(or any other tool you may be using, like PAM, etc.) which dumps the
passwords in clear text to a suitable file, pipe, or socket.
So good luck with that requirement..
Cheers,
Bernardo
