Novel Terrapin attack uses prefix truncation to downgrade the security of SSH channels.
  • Piatro@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Bit of an alarmist headline here. The vulnerability has been patched in the most common clients (openssh) and it was because the protocol wasn’t being implemented correctly. To say that the SSH protocol “just got a lot weaker” is just not true.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      It doesn’t look that simple to me. From the Terrapin paper:

      Although we suggest backward-compatible countermea- sures to stop our attacks, we note that the security of the SSH protocol would benefit from a redesign from scratch. This redesign should be guided by all findings and insights from both practical and theoretical security analysis, in a similar manner as was done for TLS 1.3.

      It seems the protocol itself needs a revision and implementation-specific patches are easier and less-than-ideal solutions.

      One could argue that even these solutions they provide are already changes to the protocol, and not just fixes to implementation bugs. Both the Sequence Number Reset and Full Transcript Hash add or change functionality at the communication protocol level, rather than simply covering corner cases.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Once in place, this piece of dedicated hardware surreptitiously inhaled thousands of user names and passwords before it was finally discovered.

    Ylönen, who at the time knew little about implementing strong cryptography in code, set out to develop the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) in early 1995, about three months after the discovery of the password sniffer.

    As one of the first network tools to route traffic through an impregnable tunnel fortified with a still-esoteric feature known as “public key encryption,” SSH quickly caught on around the world.

    Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the protocol, which underpins the security of apps used inside millions of organizations, including cloud environments crucial to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other large companies.

    Now, nearly 30 years later, researchers have devised an attack with the potential to undermine, if not cripple, cryptographic SSH protections that the networking world takes for granted.

    The attack targets the BPP, short for Binary Packet Protocol, which is designed to ensure that adversaries with an active position can’t add or drop messages exchanged during the handshake.

    The original article contains 658 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!