Showing passwords for failed login attempts
 

Hello,

I made my own firewall using Fedora and Shorewall. I use SSH to login and administer the firewall, as needed.

Of course when looking in the /var/log folder, I see numerious attempts to log into root, and other accounts, using what has to be a dictonary of names.

Now here is my question. Not only do I want to see that user names were used to try and login, I would like to see what passwords were used for each attempt. This does not seem to be happening now. Is there a way to have this information logged?

Better yet
 

Instead of trying to capture passwords (which would be difficult with ssh, and set you to fighting with the password security of your own system at best) why not set up to ensure that all attempts will fail from any IP address initiating such activity? (for a 24 hours perhaps, after a certain number of failures)

Thus more secure, and what passwords they try are irrelevant (unless they guess the right one very quickly).

I really like the thought of the bad-guys zombies spinning their wheels for days at a time on a lost cause, which ties them up and gives them less time to attack vulnerable targets.

Not my goal :-)
 

I'm not worried about them getting in, I have root login disabled, and 30+ char complex passwords on all accounts, and my account is the only one able to sudo.

I guess what I am looking to do is use that password data to build my own password list(s), and just plain curiosity :-)

As far as difficult, when the password is passed to the kernal, its already been decrypted by sshd, no?

@Weinie, there are many projects and studies on the 'net that analyze commonly attempted passwords. You might try a few searches and see what you can come up with.

I don't know of a way to make sshd(8) report passwords, even with the highest debug level turned on. And that's a very good thing. There may be honeypot utilities you can install to glean this info on a (phony) system / service.

In any case, I recommend that you do some research on existing data rather than reinventing the wheel.

Thanks
 

OK, thats the answer I'm looking for. Thre is not a way to make sshd record the passwords used in a session logon event. Just wanted to make sure I haden't missed something.

Thanks.