From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Description of problem:
Logging in with ssh gives an erroneous "authentication failure" message in the 
logs and generates a 2-3 second delay before successful login.

This does not occur with previous versions of openssh. Apparently this is due 
to the recent ssh security fix which passes all auth attempts to PAM so that 
the delay on failure is always the same. But in this case no failure should be 
occuring.

Refer to the following debian bug report (which is fixed and closed) for more 
details and solution:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=192207

This is also discussed on the taroon beta list:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/taroon-beta-list/2003-August/msg00171.html

This problem still occurs with the latest Red Hat openssh 3.2.6p2-6.

regards,

-Simon

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.6.1p2-2

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in with ssh (using password authentication)
    

Actual Results:
1. authentication failure error in /var/log/messages
2. 2-3 seconds delay
3. successful login

Expected Results:
1. successful login

Additional info: