Re: known_hosts vulnerability?

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Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 08:02:47 +1000
To: "Gabriel M. Elder" <eldergabriel@charter.net>

Gabriel M. Elder wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I came across a security news article, referenced by
> http://www.linux.org/news, at
>
> http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3668
>
> talking about an SSH weakness involving the known_hosts file. I
> apologize if this issue has already been addressed, but the mailing list
> archives didn't turn up anything when i tried searching for something
> relevant. So; not to knee-jerk or anything, but is anyone currently
> looking into this? Does this need to be addressed, or has it already
> been taken care of? Offhand, on a scale of 0 - 11, this would seem to
> rate kinda high, ~7. Am i off-base?

It is a problem mainly for large educational facilities and labs, where
users use weak authenticators (same passwords, password-less public
keys, etc) on multiple hosts. In these cases, an attacker (or their
worm) could use the known_hosts file as a hit-list of other hosts to
try.

I think some of the publicity is a little overblown because the same
information is available from many other sources: shell histories,
netstat or ps output, etc. Furthermore, if an account is already
compromised, then there are far more effective ways for a worm to gain
access to other accounts (e.g. fudge $PATH to contain a trojan ssh that
steals account/password/host information directly).

Anyway, we implemented the HashKnownHosts (see "man ssh") to address
this. Admins should be aware that this doesn't make the problem go away,
but it does make the attack harder (hopefully too hard for a worm).

>>From the article: "a known_hosts hashing scheme proposed by MIT has been
> implemented in OpenSSH 4.0 and in a patch for earlier versions of SSH".
> Looking at my own ~/.ssh/known_hosts file, the entries appear to be
> encrypted, by default; i assume this is a Good Thing. Installed ssh
> package = openssh-server-3.9p1-8.0.1. Shall i now resume my warm fuzzies
> and assume all is snug and secure in openssh-land?

No - unless your admins have modified 3.9p1 for you, your file probably
looks like:

hostname ssh-rsa AAAAAPO7JD765SPF2OJ337FSAPSO...

This change is about hashing "hostname" so noone can tell what hosts you
have visited.

-d

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