screaming tty

screaming tty

[Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number ofrandom characters at the operating system. This can happen ifthe terminal is either disconnected or connected to apowered-off terminal but still enabled for login;misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck canstart such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two canseriously degrade the performance of a vanilla Unix system;the arriving "characters" are treated as userid/password pairsand tested as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm isdesigned to be computationally intensive in order to foilbrute-force crack attacks, so although none of the loginssucceeds; the overhead of rejecting them all can besubstantial.