Running Dropbear Without Root Permissions

Nixon, Kent W kwn2 at pitt.edu
Fri Jun 10 16:43:20 AWST 2016


Hi all,

I'm currently testing my (default) compile settings of dropbear 2016.73 on an x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04 machine. I'm running the dropbear server from the terminal of a standard user account and attempting to connect using dbclient as that same user from the same machine just to test/learn how to use dropbear before I attempt to cross-compile it and run it on an Android system.

I currently run the following command to start the server:

dropbear -F -p 6666 -E -R -m

And attempt to connect (using the same machine) as the same user that is running dropbear using:

dbcleint -p 6666 -y <username>@127.0.0.1

Everything seems to work well, except that after I enter the appropriate password, the client is rejected by the server which posts the message:

User account '<username>' is locked

However, following the same steps as above, but running the dropbear server with root permissions, everything works as expected (i.e. I am able to open a remote shell without any problems).

What changes when dropbear is run with standard user permissions that is causing the account to be 'locked'? Do I need to locate the rsa/dss/ecdsa keys somewhere else other than /etc/dropbear/?

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!

~ Kent


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