Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!csli!gandalf
From: gandalf@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Unix security suggestion
Message-ID: <6539@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 23 Nov 88 00:40:20 GMT
References: <8064@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <355@wwd.UUCP>
Reply-To: wagner@arisia.xerox.com (Juergen Wagner)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 12

Empty lines or comments in /etc/passwd caused the ::0:0:: or #::0:0:: lines.
Every time somebody changes his/her password, the passwd program would read
/etc/passwd, taking the respective lines for entries with an empty user name,
uid zero, etc., and later write them out. Since some entries would contain
a newline char as username, the number of these phantom user entries would
grow with each change made to any password on the system...

I hope people aren't using the buggy version of passwd any more...

-- 
Juergen Wagner		   			gandalf@csli.stanford.edu
						 wagner@arisia.xerox.com