.:Computer Defense:.

I decided to buy a hosted VPS the other day and I'm still in the process of setting everything up and ironing out the kinks. I finally got around to installing some software, which included silc. For those of you that don't know, silc is like encrypted IRC.

So when you get a VPS they give you root access and it's up to you to configure / lockdown the system however you want. So the first thing I did was create a user account. I created the account htregz (some of you may remember it's what I originally posted under here, and it's a name I generally use)... I setup silc (which involves providing a passphrase so that a keypair can be generated) . It worked without a hitch and I connected to a few of the silc networks I occasionally visit. However, I decided that I'd use ht instead of htregz, so I created a new account, removed the htregz account and connected as ht. Again I went to run silc, so that I could provide a passphrase... however this time errors were generated. I tried a couple of things but nothing was successful, so I removed the ht account and recreated the htregz account. Again with the htregz login I was able to get silc up and running without a hitch. At this point I was intrigued so I created a dummy account with a two letter username (te for test). The te account was created exactly the same as the htregz account.

 [root@XXX/]# useradd -G wheel -m -s /bin/bash htregz
[root@XXX /]# passwd htregz
Changing password for user htregz.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@XXX /]# useradd -G wheel -m -s /bin/bash te
[root@XXX /]# passwd te
Changing password for user te.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@XXX /]#

I logged in as te and once again, I couldn't get silc up and running... the error message was:

 [te@XXX ~]$ silc
Could not create public key identifier: Success
Could not create public key identifier: Success
Wrong permissions in your private key file `/home/te/.silc/private_key.prv'!
Trying to change them ... Failed to change permissions for private key file!
Permissions for your private key file must be 0600.

Apparently silc cannot successfully handle two-character usernames.

For those that are wondering about my version of silc, it is:

SILC Client 1.1.2 (Irssi base: 0.8.11+ - SILC base: SILC 1.1.2) (20070704 20070704)