Yes I was wrong to say that this an implementation detail rather than a protocol problem as the OpenSSH release notes to prevent this vulnerability include extensions to the SSH Transport Protocol, however I still believe that the headline is sensationalist at best since it can and has been protected against by patching ssh clients and servers. It would be entirely unreasonable in the majority of cases to simply stop using SSH on the basis of this vulnerability and that’s why I think the headline exaggerates the problem. The Register has a much more measured take on this including comments from the paper’s authors that people shouldn’t panic and try to fix immediately.
Comment on SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 6 months agoIt 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.
Piatro@programming.dev 6 months ago
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Whole system rewrites are almost never a good idea
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
they are when fundamental assumptions change
praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Can’t expect rewrites to be automatically better than what we have now. We have so many replacement for Clang…
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 6 months ago
In what way have the fundamental assumptions of SSH changed?
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
SSH carries design choices from the 90s that might not apply today.
But it’s the paper authors themselves who are talking about a redesign, not a random Lemmy user, so idk.
pajn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
TLS and SSH has quite different attack vectors so sure, basing SSH on TLS 1.3 would prevent the problems SSH has, but also bring in the problems TLS has. Thing is, I much prefer SSHs tradeof for things SSH is used for while TLS could be argued makes a lot more sense for the HTTPS use case. It just very different chains of trust with very different weak points, just pointing at TLS 1.3 as a solution when talking about SSH is quite ignorant.
qx128@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeaaaa, a complete redesign from scratch sounds way more dangerous. “Noah, get the boat” isn’t always the best answer. There’s been a lot of thought and testing put into the magnificent work that is SSH over the past few decades.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I won’t pretend I know better than the paper authors, what I can say is that some fixes are not incremental.
There are cases that mature tools and protocols should be left behind.