[4001] in Athena Bugs
grplist of 255 chars.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Thu Jan 18 00:47:22 1990
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 90 00:47:05 -0500
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
From: Richard Basch <probe@MIT.EDU>
"mar" already knows about this... it is probably just a bug in the
conversion from UNSPECA to TXT on the servers, as jik suggested.
However, I am forwarding this here for the record...
-Richard
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 90 00:13:05 -0500
From: Jonathan I. Kamens <jik@PIT-MANAGER.MIT.EDU>
Sender: jik@PIT-MANAGER.MIT.EDU
To: srz@CHARON.MIT.EDU
Cc: tiger-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Stanley R Zanarotti's message of Wed, 17 Jan 90 23:45:26 EST <9001180445.AA14870@CHARON.MIT.EDU>
Subject: List creation
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 90 23:45:26 EST
From: srz@CHARON.MIT.EDU (Stanley R Zanarotti)
As you can tell from the header, I've created a list, tiger-team@MIT.EDU,
for people who are participating in the IAP activity. I would have
set the access controls for /afs/sipb/project/tiger by now, but I was
having problems creating an AFS group in the SIPB cell. I will fix
this shortly.
It is somewhat ironic that when the group "tiger-team" was added to
my GRPLIST information in hesiod, I was suddenly no longer able to log
in.
It seems that the addition of that group made my GRPLIST exactly 255
characters long, and there is apparently a bug in the nameserver code
that screws up when encountering UNSPECA values of exactly 255
characters and attempting to convert them to TXT (or at least, that is
the hypothetical cause of the bug that Mark Rosenstein and I came up
with, although it hasn't been found yet).
I guess that's one form of a denial-of-service attack.... if you
want to prevent someone from logging in, just add them to the correct
groups to make their GRPLIST string 255 characters long :-).
jik
P.S. I managed to log in by adding the correct group list to
named.local on my workstation.
------- End Forwarded Message
