On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:59:14 -0600, Chris Mason wrote:
>
>My security problem arose because I was in the habit of keying a userid, then
>tabbing and keying in the password. All the time I would be looking at the
>keyboard - as poor typists do!
>
>The trouble is that I needed to enter different userids at different times - as
>one does if preparing a class which requires different "users". The userid
>field
>has 8 characters - or did - and my usual userid had less that 8 characters but
>sometimes I needed to enter an userid of the full size, 8 characters.
>
>The problem was that the bright sparks who designed the 3270 data stream
>which builds the logon panel quite correctly make the password field "non-
>display" - not rocket science to come up with that innovation - but then took
>it into their tiny heads to give the protected field or fields between the
>unprotected fields the "autoskip" attribute.
>
Still broke.
It used to bug me (and presumably others) that on LOGOFF VM left
the cursor in an input field, but CP ignored anything typed there.
Apparently IBM considered it a repair to provide the full-screen
LOGON without considering the unintended consequence.
I wrote a Rexx exec for z/OS Unix Services that did:
stty -echo
< accept password >
stty echo
Works fine on a serial terminal. On 3270, it leaves the password
visible until the user presses ENTER; then it vanishes. I submitted
a PMR, calling it security, just to get IBM's attention. For some
unfathomable reason, they elected to fix it in the stty layer but
left the underlying SYSCALL service broken.
And it still bugs me that ISPF DSLIST doesn't understand that a
pattern containing wildcards can match a string shorter than the
pattern. For example:
PREFIX.*A*B*C*D*E*F*G*
can match any of:
PREFIX.ABCDEFG
PREFIX.xABCDEFG
PREFIX.AxBCDEFG
PREFIX.ABxCDEFG
PREFIX.ABCxDEFG
PREFIX.ABCDxEFG
PREFIX.ABCDExFG
PREFIX.ABCDEFxG
PREFIX.ABCDEFGx
... but DSLIST rejects the pattern because of invalid
qualifier length.
-- gil
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