Re: terminal weirdness?

[Vincent Zweije <zweije () XS4ALL NL>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:42:48AM +0100, Blake Frantz wrote:

||  I telnet'd into port 1080, pressed enter, and got disconnected...fine.
||  But, after I got disconnected "VT102" was displayed at my command prompt.
||  I figured it was just 'misplaced output' or something from telnet, but
||  when I hit enter I got 'command not found'.  I don't understand where
||  VT102 came from, and why my shell interpreted it as valid input from
||  STDIN.   I checked env and term=vt100.  Just to do it, I
||
||  strings `which telnet` | egrep -i "vt102"
||
||  and nothing was found.  Could this be something sent from the proxy
||  server?  If so, can it be changed arbitrarily (rm -r *)?

Your terminal is (or emulates) a VT102.

The server at port 1080 didn't just close the connection; it sent a few
bytes first.  These happened to be a VT102 control code, asking the VT102
to report its type.  The terminal dutifully put "VT102" on stdin as if
typed, so that it would go to the program reading stdin.  However, the
telnet connection was closed by then, and the string went to your shell.

I don't think it's exploitable, but I'm not sure what codes can be sent
by a terminal.  It would be an interesting exploit for sure.

Ciao.                                                            Vincent.
-- 
Vincent Zweije <zweije () xs4all nl>    | "If you're flamed in a group you
<http://www.xs4all.nl/~zweije/>      | don't read, does anybody get burnt?"
[Xhost should be taken out and shot] |            -- Paul Tomblin on a.s.r.