Page 1 of 1

Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 24th, '15, 21:21
by bobw
How do you get rid of this annoyance?! Why was this ever changed?

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 24th, '15, 21:49
by doktor5000
It would be helpful if you would at least provide basic context information for others to understand what you are actually asking and what your problem is.
Like, what Mageia version do you use, what security level you selected, how do you login (local/remote, tty login vs login manager login) and what your expected and actual behaviour is.

Assuming you're talking about local tty logins, the default delay is 3 seconds after an unsuccessful login, and it hasn't been changed since several years AFAICT.
Code: Select all
┌─[doktor5000@Mageia5]─[21:40:19]─[~]
└──╼ sudo grep -i delay /etc/login.defs
# Delay in seconds before being allowed another attempt after a login failure
FAIL_DELAY              3


The reason for this is pretty simple, to increase the difficulty and cost for brute-force attempts. Every sane login method has this and uses this by default.

If you don't like it, then change it to your liking.

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 24th, '15, 22:45
by bobw
Yes - for security purposes, the longer delay is very helpful...

Mageia release 4 (Official) for x86_64
3.14.43-desktop-1.mga4
standard security level

login from user to root w/wrong password....
changed FAIL_DELAY to 1, re-booted, opened Konsole, logged in as root w/wrong password - delay is still 3 seconds.
verified that FAIL_DELAY is set to 1 in /etc/login.defs

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 25th, '15, 00:03
by doktor5000
Check your pam configuration for either pam_faildelay or pam_unix and/or pam_tcb and add nodelay as option.
You might need to check /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/system-auth at least.
See http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... t-password
or https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blo ... AuthDelays for details.
Also check the login man page for more details.

Also, what does "login from user to root w/wrong password" mean? What exactly do you run to login as the other user?
And you did not answer the question regarding context information of the login. local/remote? And do you use su, sudo, or what else?

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 25th, '15, 00:11
by bobw
"login from user to root w/wrong password"

I'm logging in from a normal user (me) to root (to do some maintainence) using the WRONG root password to trigger a failed login to force a timeout delay - in order to see if the timeout delay changed from 3 seconds to 1 second.

Can one REMOTELY log into KONSOLE ? If that's a possibility, then I will clarify - local.

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 25th, '15, 01:11
by doktor5000
bobw wrote:I'm logging in from a normal user (me) to root (to do some maintainence) using the WRONG root password to trigger a failed login to force a timeout delay - in order to see if the timeout delay changed from 3 seconds to 1 second.

Can one REMOTELY log into KONSOLE ? If that's a possibility, then I will clarify - local.

I've understood WHAT you're doing, but not HOW in particular. C'mon, is it really so hard to answer questions?
doktor5000 wrote:What exactly do you run to login as the other user?



Apart from that, I've already provided all the pointers I could, given the information that was given.

Re: Failed login timeout

PostPosted: May 25th, '15, 03:15
by bobw
Sorry - su.

Open konsole, su <cr>, type wrong password....