Reporting User Login Failures

This section explains how Tectia Server reports user login failures to the operating system. Notice that this is different from recording login events to the audit system. The operating system can use the login failure reports to block user accounts, for instance.

When password authentication or keyboard-interactive authentication with passwords is used, Tectia Server will report every failing password login attempt to the operating system.

With all other authentication methods on AIX and HP-UX, Tectia Server will report one login failure when the connection has been disconnected, if no login failures have been reported previously. On other Unix platforms, Tectia Server does not report any login failures in this case.

When any third-party authentication methods are used, such as keyboard-interactive authentication with PAM, the used method may report the login failures to the operating system independently.

For example:

If public key and PAM are used as the authentication methods, and all user login attempts fail, Tectia Server will report only one login failure.
If public key, PAM and password (with 5 attempts allowed) are used as the authentication methods, and all attempts fail, Tectia Server will report 5 login failures.