I just saw a paper that pointed out a new way to do password-guessing
on Suns. If the site uses secure NFS, then /etc/publickey has private-
public key pairs, with the private key encrypted by the user's login
password. And this file is publicly readable. So you guess at a password,
encrypt a message with the public key, and try decrypting it with the
decrypted private key. Repeat as needed...
The paper is
@article{Gong93,
author = Li Gong and Mark A. Lomas and Roger M. Needham and Jerome H. Saltzer},
title = {Protecting Poorly Chosen Secrets from Guessing Attacks},
journal = {{IEEE} Journal on Selected Areas in Communications},
volume = 11,
number = 5,
month = {June},
year = 1993,
pages = {648--656}
}
It's a cryptographic protocol paper, not a systems implementation paper.
(And their criticisms of the competing protocol Michael Merritt and I
did are just plain wrong...)
--Steve Bellovin
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