Technology

59534 readers

3197 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by eager_eagle@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Piatro@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.world 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Whole system rewrites are almost never a good idea

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

they are when fundamental assumptions change