Secure testing team - May 2008 - Bug#482352: libpam-runtime: login for nonexistent user fails without password prompt

Package: libpam-runtime
Version: 0.99.7.1-6
Severity: grave
Tags: security
Justification: user security hole


At console login, an invalid username will cause the login procedure to 
fail *before* it prompts you for a password.  (I only discovered this 
because I accidentally mistyped my username.)  This allows someone to 
discover, without ever logging in, whether a given username exists on 
the system or not.  Seems like an important security issue.  The exact 
same issue cropped up on Arch Linux last fall (Nov 2007), where it was 
determined to be a libpam problem.  I don''t know enough to know which 
libpam package precisely is involved, but I only have three on my 
system: libpam-modules, libpam-runtime, libpam0g, all with the same 
maintainer, so hopefully this is getting to the right person.

Relevant Arch bug report:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8742

Apologies if I''ve reported this as too severe: it was dealt with as
high
severity in Arch, and seems like a major issue to this layman.  Wish I 
could tell you more, but as far as I can tell that''s the extent of the 
problem; everything works just fine if you login with a name that exists 
on the system.

-NF


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, ''testing'')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

-- no debconf information