[CLUE-Tech] Bash and password entry

[Matt Gushee]

Thanks to all who responded! I've gotten some good ideas out of this.

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 06:52:27PM -0700, Dave Anselmi wrote:

> Does -B to scp help?  The man page isn't specific.

Hmm. Probably not in this case. What I actually need to do is:

  1) Compare the system time on the two machines;
  2) Compare the last modified times of all files in the directories
     of interest, adjusting for any clock skew; then
  3) Copy the more recent versions to the other host -- which could
     go either or both directions.

But, as I mentioned, I can just do it all in an ssh-agent session, so
my script doesn't need to deal with authentication.

But you've got me interested. Now I will have to find out what scp -B
does.

> I guess that if a machine is safe enough to keep your password for you, you
> can just put it on disk (protected by filesystem permissions).  If it isn't
> safe enough for that, it isn't safe to do anything but prompt when it's
> needed.

Could you expand on that statement a bit? I'm not a security expert 
(obviously), but I would've guessed that a password stored on disk would
be a good deal easier for a cracker to access than one in memory. 
-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/