                  Authentication to a NNTP server with tin

Tin is able to do authentication to news servers according to the "Common
NNTP Extensions" (this document is available at [1]). There are several
ways of authentication described in that text which are referred to as
Original AUTHINFO, AUTHINFO GENERIC, and AUTHINFO SIMPLE. Tin supports the
Original AUTHINFO and the AUTHINFO GENERIC methods. In addition to answers
to authentication requests as described in the "Common NNTP Extensions",
tin also provides authentication at connection startup.

Unfortunately, you cannot rely on the response codes of authentication
requests as described in the "Common NNTP Extensions"; today's news servers
mostly send NNTP codes 480, regardless of the type of authentication they
expect. Therefore, authentication is always done in the same manner: First,
tin tries an AUTHINFO GENERIC authorization. If this fails, Original
AUTHINFO is used. If this does not work for you (which it should), please
contact me to track this problem down. There are known problems with the
reference nntp server available at ftp.academ.com -- this is a server bug
and not tin's fault; if you need a patch or workaround, drop me a mail.

Authentication requests will be handled whenever they occur; the command
that caused the request will be sent again.

For an authentication with the Original AUTHINFO method, tin needs a
user-name and a password for the current news server. This information is
obtained from a file .newsauth in the $HOME directory. The format of the
.newsauth file is as follows:

news.server1 password1 [username1]
news.server2 password2 [username2]
...

The first line matching the current news server is taken. The delimiters
between the fields MUST be spaces or TABS. If a password contains spaces,
you have to surround the whole password by double quotes. If no user-name is
given for the current news server, the user-id of the user who started tin
is assumed.

Security consideration: Make sure that the .newsauth file cannot be read by
others. Tin checks the permissions of the file and complains if they are
insecure (i.e., if they are not -rw-------) but continues.

If you do not have a .newsauth file in your $HOME directory, tin prompts
you for a user-name and a password. This is not done automatically at
connection startup, because there is no way for tin to find out if an
authentication at this time is needed. If you need to authenticate at the
beginning of your news session, use the -A option when invoking tin or just
provide a .newsauth file.

The AUTHINFO GENERIC authentication was implemented by someone else and has
not been tested by me since I do not know a server that supports this.

To use AUTHINFO GENERIC, set up an environment variable NNTPAUTH with the
command and its parameters to invoke for authentication. The content of
NNTPAUTH is also used as the authenticator in the AUTHINFO GENERIC response
to the server. The environment variable NNTP_AUTH_FDS is used to store file
descriptors for reading from and writing to the server, and for a temporary
file ("cookie"); the three descriptors are separated by dots. The
authentication command can take use of NNTP_AUTH_FDS when invoked; it should
exit successful if the authentication was accepted.

If NNTPAUTH is empty or not available, tin sends an "authinfo generic any
<user-id>" command to the server and expects the result as an NNTP response
code.

The AUTHINFO SIMPLE authentication method is not supported by tin (and
possibly won't be since nobody seems to use it and there are some problems
with the protocol). If you need this, drop me a message or see the source
code in auth.c. With the specification at [1], the implementation should not
be difficult.

Dirk Nimmich (2000-01-22)
<nimmich@uni-muenster.de>

References:
<http://www.karlsruhe.org/rfc/rfc2980.txt>
