PuTTY bug xdmauth-replay

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summary: PuTTY doesn't apply replay protection to XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1
class: bug: This is clearly an actual problem we want fixed.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
present-in: 2005-01-23
fixed-in: 2005-02-03 (0.58) (0.59) (0.60) (0.61) (0.62) (0.63) (0.64)

The XDMCP specification says that an X server should only accept an
XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 if no packet containing the same (N, T) pair has been
received in the last 20 minutes.  This provides replay protection, but
PuTTY's X11 proxy doesn't implement it, leaving it potentally open to
replay attacks.

NB: I (BJH) think that this 20 minutes is incorrect -- used tokens should
be remembered until they're so old that they'd be rejected for that reason
alone, which could be 40 minutes after they're received allowing for clock
skew.

As a corollory to this, when using XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 to talk to a local
server, PuTTY should avoid generating the same token more than once, which
it can currently do for Unix-domain connections because it doesn't vary the
address field.  Xlib decrements the address field (starting at 0xffffffff)
for each connection it makes.

Audit trail for this bug.


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(last revision of this bug record was at 2005-02-03 12:52:25 +0000)