ISS X-Force released an advisory about an OpenSSH "Remote Challenge Vulnerability". Unfortunately, the advisory was incorrect on some points, leading to widespread confusion about the impact of this vulnerability. No version of OpenSSH in Debian is affected by the SKEY and BSD_AUTH authentication methods described in the ISS advisory. However, Debian does include OpenSSH servers with the PAM feature described as vulnerable in the later advisory by the OpenSSH team. (This vulnerable feature is authentication using PAM via the keyboard-interactive mechanism [kbdint].) This vulnerability affects OpenSSH versions 2.3.1 through 3.3. No exploit is currently known for the PAM/kbdint vulnerability, but the details are publicly known. All of these vulnerabilities were corrected in OpenSSH 3.4.
In addition to the vulnerabilities fixes outlined above, our OpenSSH packages version 3.3 and higher support the new privilege separation feature from Niels Provos, which changes ssh to use a separate non-privileged process to handle most of the work. Vulnerabilities in the unprivileged parts of OpenSSH will lead to compromise of an unprivileged account restricted to an empty chroot, rather than a direct root compromise. Privilege separation should help to mitigate the risks of any future OpenSSH compromise.
Debian 2.2 (potato) shipped with an ssh package based on OpenSSH 1.2.3, and is not vulnerable to the vulnerabilities covered by this advisory. Users still running a version 1.2.3 ssh package do not have an immediate need to upgrade to OpenSSH 3.4. Users who upgraded to the OpenSSH version 3.3 packages released in previous iterations of DSA-134 should upgrade to the new version 3.4 OpenSSH packages, as the version 3.3 packages are vulnerable. We suggest that users running OpenSSH 1.2.3 consider a move to OpenSSH 3.4 to take advantage of the privilege separation feature. (Though, again, we have no specific knowledge of any vulnerability in OpenSSH 1.2.3. Please carefully read the caveats listed below before upgrading from OpenSSH 1.2.3.) We recommend that any users running a back-ported version of OpenSSH version 2.0 or higher on potato move to OpenSSH 3.4.
The current pre-release version of Debian (woody) includes an OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1 package (ssh), which is vulnerable to the PAM/kbdint problem described above. We recommend that users upgrade to OpenSSH 3.4 and enable privilege separation. Please carefully read the release notes below before upgrading. Updated packages for ssh-krb5 (an OpenSSH package supporting kerberos authentication) are currently being developed. Users who cannot currently upgrade their OpenSSH packages may work around the known vulnerabilities by disabling the vulnerable features: make sure the following lines are uncommented and present in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart ssh
PAMAuthenticationViaKbdInt no ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
There should be no other PAMAuthenticationViaKbdInt or ChallengeResponseAuthentication entries in sshd_config.
That concludes the vulnerability section of this advisory. What follows are release notes related to the OpenSSH 3.4 package and the privilege separation feature. URLs for the OpenSSH 3.4 packages are at the bottom.
Some notes on possible issues associated with this upgrade:
Some issues from previous OpenSSH 3.3p1 packages corrected in this advisory (not a complete changelog):
Again, we regret having to release packages with larger changes and less testing than is our usual practice; given the potential severity and non-specific nature of the original threat we decided that our users were best served by having packages available for evaluation as quickly as possible. We will send additional information as it comes to us, and will continue to work on the outstanding issues.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory. (DSA-134-2) (DSA-134-3) (DSA-134-4)