*sshole · sshhole.com
sshhole.com
openssh on musl linux has been letting people into password-less accounts since 2016.

are you affected?

  • is your sshd running on musl? (alpine, openwrt, buildroot, yocto)
  • is it not using pam? alpine’s openssh-server doesn’t by default, or maybe you set UsePAM no
  • are password logins still on? they are by default
  • is there an account with just * as its password? key-only users, ldap users, root on alpine
  • and some other account with a real password?
  • then that * account takes any password between 257 and 1024 characters

on alpine’s official aws and azure images that’s the default alpine user, and it has passwordless doas. so it’s root

on debian, ubuntu, fedora or anything else with glibc? going through pam? dropbear? openbsd? you’re fine

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    It’s not quite as simple as that. The author in this case followed a pretty specific trail to find the bug.

    Where AI helped was as the last step. They already knew what the bug would do and where to look, but actually looking through the source code for all the possible musl implementations out there would have taken a lot of time.

    So they brute-forced it instead and asked AI to spin up actual running instances of all those implementations and simply tried the bug against each of them, rather than looking at all the code.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        81·
        1 day ago

        That’s because it turns out there are tons of vulnerabilities out there introduced by very lazy and/or dumb code.

        It isn’t that AI has lowered the bar for hacking, it’s that it’s showing us just how much bad code is out there. The bar was already on the ground, we just didn’t know it.

        After all is said and done AI will actually end up raising the bar for security everywhere.

        Unfortunately we have a lot of legacy crap to clean first.

        • FiredFloridaCop@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          1 day ago

          You’re doing mental gymnastics to argue with me. Let’s try what I said worded differently in a way that hopefully helps you realize we agree:

          It is now easier to hack.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            21·
            13 hours ago

            Ah I agree it’s easier to hack. What I don’t agree with is the notion that it enables a class of people that couldn’t hack before. It’s easier to hack, yes, but for the same people who were hacking before.

            Ignorant people trying to use ready-made tools for hacking isn’t a new thing, it goes back a while, there’s even a term for it (script kiddies).

            • FiredFloridaCop@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 hours ago

              anyone who formerly had no chance due to being a “script kiddie” can now just prompt an AI* to eventually find a vulnerability

              - me, in a comment you already replied to

              • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
                1·
                6 hours ago

                Yes, and that’s what I disagree with. Neither AI nor scripts will make a script kiddie into an actual hacker.

                “AI makes hacking easy” is like saying “building houses is now easy because we have cranes”. Sure, but if you jump into a crane without knowing what you’re doing it’s not magically going to make a house appear.

                • FiredFloridaCop@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  4 hours ago

                  Fair enough; at least we’re on the same page as far as what we disagree about.

                  Your metaphor strays too far from the topic to be relevant. Here’s one that I believe is closer and makes your position look as silly as you made mine look:

                  “AI makes hacking easy” is like saying “ovens make cooking easy” when fires exist.

                  Many more people who couldn’t or wouldn’t cook before don’t have to worry about measuring or guessing temperature, manual cook times, setting up a cooking surface, etc. Does the meal cook itself? Obviously not - you still need a recipe and plenty of manual effort.

            • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusMEnglish
              1·
              9 hours ago

              it goes back a while

              It goes back at least to my teen years, which is… not remotely recent. (Edit: 90’s for the record)