OpenSSH Security Advisory: portable-keysign-rand-helper.adv This document may be found at: http://www.openssh.com/txt/portable-keysign-rand-helper.adv 1. Vulnerability Portable OpenSSH's ssh-keysign utility may allow unauthorised local access to host keys on platforms if ssh-rand-helper is used. 2. Affected configurations Portable OpenSSH prior to version 5.8p2 only on platforms that are configured to use ssh-rand-helper for entropy collection. ssh-rand-helper is enabled at configure time when it is detected that OpenSSL does not have a built-in source of randomness, and only used at runtime if this condition remains. Platforms that support /dev/random or otherwise configure OpenSSL with a random number provider are not vulnerable. In particular, *BSD, OS X, Cygwin and Linux are not affected. 3. Mitigation If host-based authentication is not in use (enabled using HostBasedAuthentication or RhostsRSAAuthentication in sshd_config), then remove the setuid bit from ssh-keysign. 4. Details ssh-keysign is a setuid helper program that is used to mediate access to the host's private host keys during host-based authentication. It would use its elevated privilege to open the keys and then immediately drop privileges to complete its cryptographic signing operations. After privilege was dropped, ssh-keysign would ensure that the OpenSSL random number generator that it depends upon was adequately prepared. On configurations that lacked a built-in source of entropy in OpenSSL, ssh-keysign would execute the ssh-rand-helper program to attempt to retrieve some from the system environment. However, the file descriptors to the host private key files were not closed prior to executing ssh-rand-helper. Since this process was "born unprivileged" and inherited the sensitive file descriptors, there was no protection against an attacker using ptrace(2) to attach to it and instructing it to read out the private keys. 5. Credit This issue was privately reported by Tomas Mraz on April 26, 2011. 6. Fix OpenSSH 5.8p2 contains a fix for this vulnerability. Future releases of portable OpenSSH will remove support for ssh-rand-helper - in 2011, there is no excuse for not providing a /dev/random-like interface as part of the OS. Users stuck on one of these platforms may use PRNGd (http://prngd.sf.net) to provide a host-wide random pool. Users of older versions that do not wish to upgrade immediately may apply this patch: Index: ssh-keysign.c =================================================================== RCS file: /var/cvs/openssh/ssh-keysign.c,v retrieving revision 1.43 diff -u -p -r1.43 ssh-keysign.c --- ssh-keysign.c 10 Sep 2010 01:12:09 -0000 1.43 +++ ssh-keysign.c 29 Apr 2011 01:25:55 -0000 @@ -167,6 +167,9 @@ main(int argc, char **argv) key_fd[0] = open(_PATH_HOST_RSA_KEY_FILE, O_RDONLY); key_fd[1] = open(_PATH_HOST_DSA_KEY_FILE, O_RDONLY); + if (fcntl(key_fd[0], F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) != 0 || + fcntl(key_fd[1], F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) != 0) + fatal("fcntl failed"); original_real_uid = getuid(); /* XXX readconf.c needs this */ if ((pw = getpwuid(original_real_uid)) == NULL)