There are two separate issues:

 1. Should you only say that the userid/password combinations is bad? I have no 
problem with that.

 2. Should you auto-revoke after n failed attempts? That's the vector for the 
DOS attack.

IMHO it makes more sense to introduce an exponential delay, block the IP 
address or some oapproach that makes it hader to deliberately suspend a batch 
of user ids.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3


________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of 
Charles Mills <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 1:16 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: IBM AOAR O44855

It's true. And there are various sources that will give the bad guy one or
more candidate userid's -- with any luck a senior sysprog id -- for a given
site. Think of the IBMMAIN archives, for example. Or sites where the user
guide is available online. And with one ID it is not hard to bootstrap to
other ID's. For example, if SYS005 is a good ID at some site, then
SYS001-SYS0nn are all good candidates.

It's still better than the alternative, a lowering of the name/password
space from n*m to n+m.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 8:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: IBM AOAR O44855

That opens the way to a denial of service attack; someone can write a script
to cause revocation of a long list of userids.

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