screaming tty

[Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of

random characters at the operating system. This can happen if

the terminal is either disconnected or connected to a

powered-off terminal but still enabled for login;

misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck can

start such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can

seriously degrade the performance of a vanilla Unix system;

the arriving "characters" are treated as userid/password pairs

and tested as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm is

designed to be computationally intensive in order to foil

brute-force crack attacks, so although none of the logins

succeeds; the overhead of rejecting them all can be

substantial.

[Jargon File]