How I Scored the Avaya PBX init Password

by The Funkster Deluxe  (funk@forethought.net)

I've been in training this week for the Avaya Interaction Center 7.2.

The catch is that the last published training from Avaya University (administered, I believe, by Accenture - an outsourcer) is Interaction Center version 6.1.  Nothing like the present to update your training, eh guys?

We understood that we would get a Professional Services trainer to lead us through training while an Accenture representative stood by and wrote a new 7.2 class based on our training.

It worked out differently in that the Accenture trainer, a guy flown in from Mumbai, lead the class for the first three days and, suffice it to say, he didn't really have the "trainer" type personality.

He had a virtual image of his desktop with an encapsulated and fully (or mostly) functional Interaction Center 6.1 system, appropriate databases, workflow designer and so forth.

But this wasn't enough by itself, as a big feature of Interaction Center is the Voice Channel.  So he had a Definity (Avaya-branded telephony) simulator that went by the acronym "dads."

This platform was so unstable that I couldn't even get it running the first day.

It launched from a batch file on the desktop that would flash a DOS screen and close.  Curious, I ran the path from a command prompt so that I could see the error.

I got some sort of orys stty16 error.  I pointed it out to the trainer, because I needed this fixed to proceed with training.  He shrugged his shoulders and went back to whatever it was he was doing.  Awesome!

Eventually I got it working after rebooting, but the simulator still was not acting right.  Telephony services would stop mid-session, I had to rebuild VDNs (call routing numbers) whenever they were mysteriously lost, and I had a host of other problems.

When I launched the Simulator too early (before other necessary processes were started), it got stuck running the batch file and was sitting at the login prompt.  The login was: init

I figured the login/password pair had a good chance of being in the batch file.  It actually pointed to another file in the /dads subfolder, something like: sat-def.rc

I opened it with Notepad and there was the init login, password, and another eight or nine lines - all unencrypted.

A bro that I work with had loaded Avaya Site Administration, for customer access, on a different training PC.  We attempted to use this on our lab S8500 PBX and, sure enough, it succeeded.

The next prompt was a Challenge/Response field, with the former populated with a numeric string.

I didn't care to get in any further, because of the legal or security ramifications, but I suspected that the other fields in the unencrypted password file were a sequence for this.

I can't figure out why these simulators require init level access, but if this doesn't constitute some sort of non-disclosure violation between Avaya and Accenture, then I don't know what does.

Accenture basically handed us Avaya's deepest level password, which is used for enabling right-to-use licensing on the features from which Avaya makes tons of money.

I won't share this password, obviously, and it's possible that Avaya can change it across the board, but not without much expense and embarrassment.