SSH protects the most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker
Novel Terrapin attack uses prefix truncation to downgrade the security of SSH channels.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Once in place, this piece of dedicated hardware surreptitiously inhaled thousands of user names and passwords before it was finally discovered.
Ylönen, who at the time knew little about implementing strong cryptography in code, set out to develop the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) in early 1995, about three months after the discovery of the password sniffer.
As one of the first network tools to route traffic through an impregnable tunnel fortified with a still-esoteric feature known as "public key encryption," SSH quickly caught on around the world.
Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the protocol, which underpins the security of apps used inside millions of organizations, including cloud environments crucial to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other large companies.
Now, nearly 30 years later, researchers have devised an attack with the potential to undermine, if not cripple, cryptographic SSH protections that the networking world takes for granted.
The attack targets the BPP, short for Binary Packet Protocol, which is designed to ensure that adversaries with an active position can't add or drop messages exchanged during the handshake.
The original article contains 658 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
