14 lines
726 B
Plaintext
14 lines
726 B
Plaintext
screaming tty
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n. [Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random
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characters at the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is
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either disconnected or connected to a powered-off terminal but still enabled
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for login; misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck can start
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such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously degrade the
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performance of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving characters are treated as
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userid/password pairs and tested as such. The Unix password encryption
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algorithm is designed to be computationally intensive in order to foil
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brute-force crack attacks, so although none of the logins succeeds; the
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overhead of rejecting them all can be substantial.
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