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[–] 48 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Given this is a vuln when entering the password, just turn off password auth and use ssh keys only. It's what you should be doing anyway.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Easier said than done.

    If you have to support the sort of user that barely managed to download a copy of putty a few years ago and kept using this, then walking them through key generation and use is a nightmare.

    One could fairly argue that maybe such people shouldn't have access to a system, but it is a reality.

    Of course the likelihood that a system using musl is something that class of user would be accessing is lower.

    Maybe now that ssh is generally "just there" for Windows users, you can more easily work with them to generate a key, or give them a zip file to make them have a key in a standard way. But the interaction of ssh and windows file security can be... Interesting, though mostly an issue on the ash server side.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    One could fairly argue that maybe such people shouldn't have access to a system, but it is a reality.

    More that, such people shouldn't be allowed to be sysadmins, yet self-host and/or expose any ports to the internet.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yeah, issue being if they work for your company and management insists they have a job to do and you must provide what they ask for to do their job.

    Though the most recent guy to inflict that on me is at risk of pissing off a customer as he pulled that on them and they are complaining rightly that someone that can't sort out key based ssh auth has zero business touching their sysems. So some people can give reasonable push back.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago* (3 children)

    The vuln is specifically for key-based accounts:

    Second, the target system account must be configured to be passwordless. Passwordless accounts are commonly used for accounts that use certificate-based authentication.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 days ago

    "passwordless" here means that the account doesn't have a password. What the person you're replying to means is that password authentication should be completely disabled in the SSH config, as that's the only way to exploit this issue.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 days ago

    But passwords need to be enabled for SSH. You must submit a faulty password of a specific kind, and the SSH server misinterprets it for passwordless accounts, which means the server must be configured to allow you to attempt a password.

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