Why is there a big delay after entering a wrong password?

Question

I notice a weird (well, according to me) thing about passwords. For example, if I type an incorrect password during login, there will be a few seconds' delay before the system tells me so. When I try to sudo with a wrong password I would also have to wait before the shell says "Sorry, try again".

I wonder why it takes so long to "recognize" an incorrect password? This has been seen on several distributions I use (and even OSX), so I think it's not a distribution specific thing.

Answer 1

This is a security thing, it's not actually taking long to realize it. 2 vulnerabilities this solves:

1. this throttles login attempts, meaning someone can't pound the system as fast as it can go trying to crack it (1M attempts a sec? idk).

2. If it did it as soon as it verified your credentials were incorrect, you could use the amount of time it took for it to invalidate your credentials to help guess if part of your credentials were correct, dramatically reducing the guessing time.

to prevent these 2 things the system just takes a certain amount of time to do it, I think you can configure the wait time with PAM ( See Michaels answer ).

Security Engineering ( 2ed, amazon | 1ed, free ) gives a much better explanation of these problems.

Answer 2

This is intentional, to try and limit brute forcing. You can usually modify it by looking for the FAIL_DELAY configuration entry in /etc/login.defs and changing its value (mine is 3 seconds by default), although the comment in that file makes it sound like PAM will enforce at least a 2 second delay no matter what