Special chars humor (was password security)

[Paul De Bra]

In article <8598 at alice.UUCP> ark at alice.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) writes:
]In article <3934 at pt.cs.cmu.edu>, dlc at dlc.fac.cs.cmu.edu (Daryl Clevenger) writes:
]> Being relatively naive about
]> UNIX and not knowing its history, he picked '@' as his special character,
]> which /bin/passwd gladly accepted.
]
]Why is this a problem?  He just has to enter `@' as `\@'.
]-- 
]				--Andrew Koenig

It is a problem because of the inconsistency: the password he gave to the
passwd program is NOT the password he has to type to log on.

Passwd should have treated the char @ the same way login does, even if this
user has a different kill-line character, because login will use the default.

Paul.
-- 
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