On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 16:01 -0400, Andrew Schultz wrote: > Matthew Miller wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 03:07:19PM -0400, Andrew Schultz wrote: > >> and if you log all attempts to login, then they'll end up in the > >> logs. I'd suggest that not logging unknown users by default is a > >> much better solution than having a special log; no admin wants to > >> see passwords (even if they're root) and unknown usernames (either > >> typos or passwords) are rarely helpful. > > > > I don't think that's true. "You're typing the wrong username" happened to me > > on multiple occasions when I was doing that kind of support. > > I don't have a problem with logging the fact that a user attempted to > log in with an unknown username, and that would be sufficient for the > your diagnosis (if you can correlate times). If you can't correlate > times, then you get to scrape the logs looking for similar but invalid > usernames. A simple "what user name are you trying to log in as?" would > go much faster. > > > Additionally, it maybe useful to log this information for intrusion > > detection and correlation. > > Again, you don't need to know that the attacker guessed a username of > "bob". You simply need to recognize that N attempts were made to log in > with unknown usernames during some time period. > > > And, in general, authpriv exists as a mechanism for logging any sort of > > potentially private data. It would be a security regression to ignore that. > > Not seeing useless (typos) and confidential (passwords) information is > not a security regression. And I'm having trouble thinking of other > information that is super-private (should only be seen by root) and useful.
All very nice, but the current situation is that this info *is* sent to the log. So I applaud if you want to go and fix applications, in the meanwhile we cannot relax security around that log IMO. Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
