In a recent discussion about the Apache Chunk Handling vulnerability, which consisted of many debates and rants on how the reporting was done, ISS mentioned that they found another serious vulnerability in one other vendor's open source product. First post about this vulnerability is presented below the ISS advisory released today.



Internet Security Systems Security Advisory
OpenSSH Remote Challenge Vulnerability

ISS X-Force has discovered a serious vulnerability in the default installation of OpenSSH on the OpenBSD operating system. OpenSSH is a free version of the SSH (Secure Shell) communications suite and is used as a secure replacement for protocols such as Telnet, Rlogin, Rsh, and Ftp. OpenSSH employs end-to-end encryption (including all passwords) and is resistant to network monitoring, eavesdropping, and connection hijacking attacks. X-Force is aware of active exploit development for this vulnerability.

Advisory: http://www.net-security.org/vuln.php?id=1817



Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD and OpenSSH development team shed some light and announced that OpenSSH is vulnerable. This is his post to BugTraq mailing list:

There is an upcoming OpenSSH vulnerability that we're working on with ISS. Details will be published early next week.


However, I can say that when OpenSSH's sshd(8) is running with priv seperation, the bug cannot be exploited.

OpenSSH 3.3p was released a few days ago, with various improvements but in particular, it significantly improves the Linux and Solaris support for priv sep. However, it is not yet perfect. Compression is disabled on some systems, and the many varieties of PAM are causing major headaches.

However, everyone should update to OpenSSH 3.3 immediately, and enable priv seperation in their ssh daemons, by setting this in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file:

UsePrivilegeSeparation yes

Depending on what your system is, privsep may break some ssh functionality. However, with privsep turned on, you are immune from at least one remote hole. Understand?

3.3 does not contain a fix for this upcoming bug.

If priv seperation does not work on your operating system, you need to work with your vendor so that we get patches to make it work on your system. Our developers are swamped enough without trying to support the myriad of PAM and other issues which exist in various systems. You must call on your vendors to help us.

Basically, OpenSSH sshd(8) is something like 27000 lines of code. A lot of that runs as root. But when UsePrivilegeSeparation is enabled, the daemon splits into two parts. A part containing about 2500 lines of code remains as root, and the rest of the code is shoved into a chroot-jail without any privs. This makes the daemon less vulnerable to attack.