[Dovecot] Lots of pop3-logins

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Sun Jun 28 06:47:16 EEST 2009


On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 02:01 -0700, V S Rao wrote:
> Timo Wrote: You can also just decrease login_process_max_count
> 
> Wouldn't decreasing the login_process_max_count simply create more
> problems. Now users will start experiencing timeouts sooner than
> before, because whatever is causing the login processes to increase
> (attack, rogue process or whatever) will *always* be trying to login
> and genuine users will be denied login. So without knowing the root
> cause of the issue simply decreasing or increasing the
> login_process_max_count will lead to other problems. Correct me if I
> am wrong. 

Depends on the attacker. Dovecot will always drop the oldest connection.
So if attacker is authenticating multiple times in a single session,
it's pretty much always the oldest connection that gets killed first. If
attacker logins once and then disconnects, I think Dovecot still kills
those processes sooner than others, because they're waiting a couple of
seconds for "authentication failed".

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