Finding Passwords

Dan Bernstein brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu
Wed Oct 10 05:40:12 AEST 1990


In article <278 at pdxgate.UUCP> griffith at eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Michael Griffith) writes:
> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> >Under the assumption I made---that each communications line is direct
> >and has some unconditional way to remove any middlemen---Trojan Horses
> >are stopped. There's no need for encryption to solve this problem.
> And what, pray tell, guarantees that the line is clear? If the break key
> clears the line and prevents processes from accessing it, I sure as hell
> don't want users bumping into the break key and losing processes because
> they can't attach to the tty file.

Yes, I really do mean ``unconditional'' when I say ``unconditional.''
It's a user interface problem if people accidentally bump into the break
key. One solution is to have a harder-to-accidentally-type break
sequence. Another is to let the user reconnect to a session later if it
was accidentally cut off; pty lets you do this.

---Dan



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