[Dovecot] Limit login attempts per connection?
Tony Nelson
tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Fri Mar 5 01:43:21 EET 2010
On 10-03-04 00:51:40, tomas at tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 03:39:28PM -0500, Tony Nelson wrote:
> > Dovecot allows a large number of login attempts per connection.
> > I'd like to reduce that number to, say, 1, and let my firewall keep
> > the ducks at bay,
>
> If the firewall is the one to do the job, I'd recommend an external
> application like fail2ban. It watches the logs and bans IP addresses
> with too many failures -- the nice thing is that it's able to cover
> all applications listening on external ports. You can define patterns
> in log files to which it has to react (but it comes with a good set
> of pre-defined patterns -- at least on popular GNU/Linux distros).
I already have something that works with any program secure enough not
to allow unlimited login attempts. Using fail2ban might work if I
configure it enough to sever existing connections.
> > but I can't find anything in /etc/dovecot.conf or by
> > googling. How do I do it? Do I need to patch the source?
>
> I don't know about such a setting (but I don't know everything about
> Dovecot either!). Anyway, then it'd still the Dovecot process dealing
> with the rouge login attempts -- it seems better to keep them at the
> firewall level with the approach above.
Yes, and I'm going to use the firewall -- once I can get Dovecot to
limit the number of login attempts per connection.
Looking at the source, I see that there are no options. It tarpits a
bit, but currently has no limit on the number of attempts. I'll see
what I can do.
--
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' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
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