Brute force protection
As a non programmer, is the joke that humans will retype their password assuming that they made a typo?
If so, sick indeed.
The guy coding made it so, on your first attempt, even if you answer correctly, it will tell you your login failed due to incorrect username or password, to joke about how it feels like you always get it wrong on the first try
I remember in college editing OpenSSH source code to instead of return wrong password to a root shell prompt just to stop brute force attacks
@Pacmanlives
Couldn’t you just disable root login in the sshd config?Oh all of my configs are deny root ssh login or without-password. I noticed a significant decrease in scans when returning a root prompt when I did that. This was also in the mid 2000s so who knows how things would be in this day in age for a reduction in scans
@Pacmanlives
So it was a fake root prompt which tricked the bots into believing that they logged in successfully but in reality the prompt could do nothing on the system?Correct
This could actually work though lol, it’s genius
Rainbow tables and presumably newer stuff I haven’t heard of make this sort of thing weaker than it used to be
The rainbow table would have to include every four word combination. At around half a million words in the English dictionary, that’s not a small number.
As another XKCD comic illustrates, it’s cheaper to use a wrench.
How does a rainbow table help here? They’re more for decoding unsalted encrypted database tables, rather than for actually trying to login.
Salting makes rainbow tables pretty much useless, and salting has been a standard practise for a few decades now.
I suspect if the cracking code was constructed such that it had more weight on trying combinations of common words then this would be much easier to crack
I would naively think that as well - you would expand your alphabet of “symbols” to include both single letters and numbers and punctuation but also common words as well. It is still a lot of combinations to have to try though, even if less than each letter by itself.
