[Dovecot] Auth message

Pavel Shirov nstorm0.0 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 8 09:01:37 EEST 2008


Recently my network was scanned. Various services was scanned, and checking
the logs of mail server the following string draw my attention:
mail dovecot: pop3-login: Disconnected: user=<ttejmgpfip>, method=PLAIN,
rip=87.228.15.180, lip=x.x.x.x

This looks weird to me, because pop3-login: Disconnected looks like
succesful login attempt to me. I have no such user named ttejmgpfip exits
ofc. I've check what dovecot writes to log if try PLAIN login method with
random login/password, and it's "Aborted login".
As I'm using SQL backend for user/pass database, I'm afraid that I might
have something misconfigured and a possible sql-injection or something else
allowed attacker to "login" with random password.
Or my worries are groundless and I can get such message in some case of
unsuccessful login?
Running dovecot 1.0.rc15 (CentOS 5). Here is how my sql auth done:

default_pass_scheme = MD5
password_query = SELECT password FROM mailbox WHERE active = '1' AND
(LEFT(username, INSTR(username, '@')-1) = '%u' OR username = '%u')
user_query = SELECT maildir as home, 6000 AS uid, 6000 AS gid, domain FROM
mailbox WHERE LEFT(username, INSTR(username, '@')-1) = '%u' OR username =
'%u'

I have such query so it is possible for a user to login either as
user at domain or just as user (I have single domain).


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