screaming tty
[Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random characters at
the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is either disconnected or
connected to a powered-off terminal but still enabled for login;
misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck can start such a
terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously degrade the performance
of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving "characters" are treated as
userid/password pairs and tested as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm
is designed to be computationally intensive in order to foil brute-force crack
attacks, so although none of the logins succeeds; the overhead of rejecting them
all can be substantial.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
Scratchpad II « scream and die « Screamer «
screaming tty
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