LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 21:51:26 +0930

Re: One User, Many Passwords

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 09:35:43PM +1000, Andrew Pullin wrote:
>     I can see reasons why someone would want to have two
> passwords on one account, after all I'm sure most Linux
> users su or such like often enough so it would be handy. I
> am fairly sure that the reason you probably can't do this is
> a security issue, ie two passwords on one account, two
> possible combinations to crack. If you believe how "easy" it
> is to crack a password these days from what they say on the
> net, then doubling the number of passwords on an account
> seems to me that you half the time it takes to crack the
> account. I know I wouldn't want that on my account no matter
> how convenient it was.



I haven't been following this thread much.
But with remote ssh logins, of course, you can
have as many "passwords" as you like.
You just stick them all in the authorized keys file.

If you're doing things locally on terminals or monitors
(a bit old fashioned), then you could have multiple accounts with
one console password each, but which each start up in a
shell which makes an ssh login (with or without pass-phrase challenge)
directly to the single account that you want to be accessible with
multiple passwords.

So user 1 logs in as user "u1", gives password "p1",
and the loging activates an "ssh" command through to the
main account "u".

Working remotely, you just get each user to send you a
public key that they have the private key to.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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