Though this is an old problem, it seems that it's not widely known.



When majordomo looks for the admin_passwd it checks the line in the lists

config file and compares it against the password supplied by the user. If

they match, the password is valid.



If it doesn't match, majordomo opens the saved password as a file and reads a

line from the file. If that line matches the user-supplied password, the

password is also valid.



In other words, if you have the password in a separate file, you have two

valid passwords.



Many tutorials for setting up majordomo say you should put the password in a

separate file named .passwd. That makes it very trivial to guess

the password.



This was reported TWICE, by two different people, in 1995. None of the posts

even got a reply. The bug has been confirmed on a live majordomo 1.94.3 and

the code looks the same for 1.94.5 (the latest).



Code is in majordomo.pl, in main'valid_passwd.



Workaround:

 Move passwords from separate files into configfiles.



Fix

 Change main'valid_passwd to not compare what's in the .config file if a file

by that name exists.