this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
97 points (76.5% liked)

Technology

59132 readers
5402 users here now

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


Our Rules


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

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 150 points 10 months ago (13 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (11 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 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.

load more comments (10 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)