X11 cookies and forwarding

[Ed Phillips]

I'm guess I wasn't following the whole cookies discussion completely
(putting cookies in /tmp to avoid putting them on NFS, etc.), but I
noticed today that with 2.9.9p2, if I use "ssh -X" to start a shell on the
server, in that shell XAUTHORITY is set to /tmp/ssh-XXXXXXXX/cookies and
there are cookies placed there there.  These are the "fake" cookies for
the "server:10.X" display. When an X11 client opens a connection using the
"fake" display socket, and ssh receives the authentication packet, ssh
rewrites the "fake" cookie in the packet with the "real" cookie (which
might actually be another "fake"  cookie if you are chaining your ssh
invocations?).

So what's the real issue here... having ssh create a "fake" cookie and
that gets copied to the server side... in the user's home directory?

	Ed

Ed Phillips <ed at udel.edu> University of Delaware (302) 831-6082
Systems Programmer III, Network and Systems Services
finger -l ed at polycut.nss.udel.edu for PGP public key