Cyber Defense Advisors

New SSH Vulnerability

This is interesting:

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established.

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The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host.

Research paper:

Passive SSH Key Compromise via Lattices

Abstract: We demonstrate that a passive network attacker can opportunistically obtain private RSA host keys from an SSH server that experiences a naturally arising fault during signature computation. In prior work, this was not believed to be possible for the SSH protocol because the signature included information like the shared Diffie-Hellman secret that would not be available to a passive network observer. We show that for the signature parameters commonly in use for SSH, there is an efficient lattice attack to recover the private key in case of a signature fault. We provide a security analysis of the SSH, IKEv1, and IKEv2 protocols in this scenario, and use our attack to discover hundreds of compromised keys in the wild from several independently vulnerable implementations.