Re: [9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

Re: [9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[rob pike, esq.]

> By the way, there is a formatting problem in [the auth paper].
> Section headers are appearing appended to the end ...

There was a silly omission made reformatting the paper for the
release.  The copy on the web site should be OK; grab a copy
from there if you wish.

-rob

Re: [9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[Mike Haertel]

>Factotum remembers your passwords in local memory, protected even from
>the debugger and never swapped out.  Your secrets are safe.  This
>topic is discussed in the security paper, /sys/doc/auth.ps.

Interesting.

By the way, there is a formatting problem in that file.
Section headers are appearing appended to the end of the
immediately preceding paragraphs, rather than being set
apart on lines by themselves.

Re: [9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[andrey mirtchovski]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Mike Haertel wrote:

> After I got the 3rd system up and running and on the network, I was
> startled to notice that the system magically remembered my password
> the 2nd time I used ssh to log into a remote system.

we're experiencing some problems of the opposite kind here -- one time
passwords used on non-p9 servers do not work well with factotum.

we'll wait until next week to find out a solution :)

Re: [9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[rob pike, esq.]

Factotum remembers your passwords in local memory, protected even from
the debugger and never swapped out.  Your secrets are safe.  This
topic is discussed in the security paper, /sys/doc/auth.ps.

-rob

[9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[Mike Haertel]

It failed to install on two machines for me, but worked on third.
Previously the 3rd edition worked on all 3 machines.

1st failure: on an ASUS CUBX-E motherboard, with a 1.1GHz Pentium III
(100 MHz system bus).  It made it into 9load, but just after 9load
printed the first "." when trying to load 9pcflop.gz, it bombed out
with the message "bad kernel format".  Was reproducible.

2nd failure: a Toshiba Satellite 4280ZDVD laptop.  Almost immediately
after getting into 9load, it got some kind of panic related to
interrupt 14.  Also reproducible.

Success: Finally, the exact same floppy worked on an ancient ASUS
P6NP4 motherboard with a 333 MHz P6T CPU.

Ok, enough with installation woes...


After I got the 3rd system up and running and on the network, I was
startled to notice that the system magically remembered my password
the 2nd time I used ssh to log into a remote system.  Factotum(4)
in action.  But I am a bit concerned.  After all the historical
security problems associated with things like web browsers or
the Windows password manager, that "helpfully" remember passwords,
to see that in Plan 9 was actually kind of creepy.

I haven't rebooted the system yet, but I did notice that I wasn't
asked for any kind of password when I first booted the system and
logged in as Glenda, which implies that there is no reproducible
encryption key protecting any of this info.  Therefore I am
hoping that:

(1) these remembered passwords will go away when i reboot the
    machine again.

(2) the remembered passwords can never get written to disk (not
    even in swap space)