password authenticaton broken?

Discuss usability issues, general maintenance, and general support issues for a grsecurity-enabled system.

password authenticaton broken?

Postby Blub » Thu Jul 17, 2014 12:54 pm

In commit 4b92354057 the code to cut off the entered password's newline character was removed. (It was probably not obvious that that's its purpose.)
This task is now performed in a somewhat unsettling way by the generate_hash function like this:
Code: Select all
   pos = (char *)memchr(entry->passwd, '\n', strlen((char *)entry->passwd));
   if (pos)
      *pos = '\0';


This is however not exactly the same (albeit equivalent when you type the password on the commandline).
The problem though arises when trying to authenticate, because the -a operation only reads the passowrd, but doesn't generate a hash. That means a password is stored without a newline in the pw file, but keeps its newline when trying to authenticate, making that impossible.

I think it would be better if generate_hash() would take a `const` input, and not mess with it, and the newline-removal needs to be added back to read_user_passwd() in gradm_pw.c

gradm_sha256.c: generate_hash()
gradm_pw.c: read_user_passwd()

Commit url: https://cvsweb.grsecurity.net/?p=gradm. ... aa9c962775

(And maybe add a comment as it has nothing to do with what's suggested in the commit: making sure the password is null terminated. Any code of a form similar `x[strlen(x)] = 0` should raise a red flag.)
Blub
 
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Jul 15, 2014 4:38 am

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