poppassd/tcp

Description

poppassd/tcp or as it is alternately known as epass/tcp provides a mechanism to change account passwds on the server. It seems to have evolved as a response to the problem of having a popmail client on a server, but not wishing to give a user a full shell account on the server.

Protocl

An example dialogue over the tcp connection might be(C for client, S for server):

  S: 200 Hello\r\n
  C: user me\r\n
  S: 300 Please send current password\r\n
  C: pass mypassword\r\n
  S: 200 send New Pass Word\r\n
  C: newpass newpassword\r\n
  S: 200 successful\r\n
  C: quite\r\n

Note that these are not exact and that this is not complete.

Notes

Implementation

The most up to date server I have found is at ftp.qualcomm.com in the directory /quest/unix/servers/password (Source Code)

A few notes are in order. First, this seems to be a renegade choice for service number. Second, the protocol is insecure. It passes cleartext passwords over the net.

Reference Person