This removes both uses of SHA-1 in the file format: it was used as the
MAC protecting the key file against tamperproofing, and also used in
the key derivation step that converted the user's passphrase to cipher
and MAC keys.
The MAC is simply upgraded from HMAC-SHA-1 to HMAC-SHA-256; it is
otherwise unchanged in how it's applied (in particular, to what data).
The key derivation is totally reworked, to be based on Argon2, which
I've just added to the code base. This should make stolen encrypted
key files more resistant to brute-force attack.
Argon2 has assorted configurable parameters for memory and CPU usage;
the new key format includes all those parameters. So there's no reason
we can't have them under user control, if a user wants to be
particularly vigorous or particularly lightweight with their own key
files. They could even switch to one of the other flavours of Argon2,
if they thought side channels were an especially large or small risk
in their particular environment. In this commit I haven't added any UI
for controlling that kind of thing, but the PPK loading function is
all set up to cope, so that can all be added in a future commit
without having to change the file format.
While I'm at it, I've also switched the CBC encryption to using a
random IV (or rather, one derived from the passphrase along with the
cipher and MAC keys). That's more like normal SSH-2 practice.
When I transcribed the code into this document, I misread 'put_data'
as 'put_string' in several places, and documented SSH-style string
length headers that do not actually exist in the format.
Somebody on comp.security.ssh asked about it recently, and I decided
that storing it in a comment in the key file was not really good
enough. Also, that comment was incomplete (it listed the private key
formats for RSA and DSA but not any of the newer ECC key types, simple
as their private-key formats may be).
A user wrote in to point out the one in winhandl.c, and out of sheer
curiosity, I grepped the whole source base for '([a-zA-Z])\1\1' to see
if there were any others. Of course there are a lot of perfectly
sensible ones, like 'www' or 'Grrr', not to mention any amount of
0xFFFF and the iiii/bbbb emphasis system in Halibut code paragraphs,
but I did spot one more in the recently added udp.but section on
traits, and another in a variable name in uxagentsock.c.
A user mentioned having found this confusing recently, and fair
enough, because it's done in a way that doesn't quite match the
built-in OO system of any language I know about. But after the
rewriting in recent years, I think pretty much everything in PuTTY
that has a system of interchangeable implementations of the same
abstract type is now done basically the same way, so this seems like a
good moment to document the idiom we use and explain all its ins and
outs.
It referred to the global variable 'flags' as an example. But 'flags'
was retired (and good riddance) nearly a year ago, in commit
4ea811a0bf. So we should be using a different example now!
When I added the psusan man page, I noticed that they've all got
impenetrable names like 'man-pl.but' to fit within 8.3 naming. But
this source base hasn't had to worry about 8.3 naming conventions in a
long time, so I think I can safely rename all those files to ones
whose purpose is more obvious.
I've been collecting actual examples of things I've used psusan for,
and now I think I have enough of them to make some kind of case for
why it's a useful tool. So I've written a man page, and dumped all my
collected examples in there.
Two minor memory-leak fixes on 0.74 seem not to be needed on master:
the fix in an early exit path of pageant_add_keyfile is done already
on master in a different way, and the missing sfree(fdlist) in
uxsftp.c is in code that's been completely rewritten in the uxcliloop
refactoring.
Other minor conflicts: the rework in commit b52641644905 of
ssh1login.c collided with the change from FLAG_VERBOSE to
seat_verbose(), and master and 0.74 each added an unrelated extra
field to the end of struct SshServerConfig.
This mitigates CVE-2020-14002: if you're in the habit of clicking OK
to unknown host keys (the TOFU policy - trust on first use), then an
active attacker looking to exploit that policy to substitute their own
host key in your first connection to a server can use the host key
algorithm order in your KEXINIT to (not wholly reliably) detect
whether you have a key already stored for this host, and if so, abort
their attack to avoid giving themself away.
However, for users who _don't_ use the TOFU policy and instead check
new host keys out of band, the dynamic policy is more useful. So it's
provided as a configurable option.
The previous prompts were part of transcripts pasted directly from a
particular historical cmd session, but that's no reason to keep them
lying around confusingly, especially since we keep regenerating some
of those transcripts outside that historical context. Replace them all
with nice simple C:\> which shouldn't confuse anyone with extraneous
detail.
This is the same protocol that PuTTY's connection sharing has been
using for years, to communicate between the downstream and upstream
PuTTYs. I'm now promoting it to be a first-class member of the
protocols list: if you have a server for it, you can select it in the
GUI or on the command line, and write out a saved session that
specifies it.
This would be completely insecure if you used it as an ordinary
network protocol, of course. Not only is it non-cryptographic and wide
open to eavesdropping and hijacking, but it's not even _authenticated_
- it begins after the userauth phase of SSH. So there isn't even the
mild security theatre of entering an easy-to-eavesdrop password, as
there is with, say, Telnet.
However, that's not what I want to use it for. My aim is to use it for
various specialist and niche purposes, all of which involve speaking
it over an 8-bit-clean data channel that is already set up, secured
and authenticated by other methods. There are lots of examples of such
channels:
- a userv(1) invocation
- the console of a UML kernel
- the stdio channels into other kinds of container, such as Docker
- the 'adb shell' channel (although it seems quite hard to run a
custom binary at the far end of that)
- a pair of pipes between PuTTY and a Cygwin helper process
- and so on.
So this protocol is intended as a convenient way to get a client at
one end of any those to run a shell session at the other end. Unlike
other approaches, it will give you all the SSH-flavoured amenities
you're already used to, like forwarding your SSH agent into the
container, or forwarding selected network ports in or out of it, or
letting it open a window on your X server, or doing SCP/SFTP style
file transfer.
Of course another way to get all those amenities would be to run an
ordinary SSH server over the same channel - but this approach avoids
having to manage a phony password or authentication key, or taking up
your CPU time with pointless crypto.
The number of people has been steadily increasing who read our source
code with an editor that thinks tab stops are 4 spaces apart, as
opposed to the traditional tty-derived 8 that the PuTTY code expects.
So I've been wondering for ages about just fixing it, and switching to
a spaces-only policy throughout the code. And I recently found out
about 'git blame -w', which should make this change not too disruptive
for the purposes of source-control archaeology; so perhaps now is the
time.
While I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to remove all the
trailing spaces from source lines (on the basis that git dislikes
them, and is the only thing that seems to have a strong opinion one
way or the other).
Apologies to anyone downstream of this code who has complicated patch
sets to rebase past this change. I don't intend it to be needed again.
Because SSH-1 is a very niche interest these days. Mostly this affects
the public key documentation.
Also, a couple of unrelated concessions to modernity.
- Mention public key authentication
- Define and describe the "terminal window"
- Mention trust sigils
- Describe here the lack of feedback in password prompts, as well as in
the FAQ
Remove the 'winhelp-topic' IDs from the Halibut source, and from the
code. Now we have one fewer name to think of every time we add a
setting.
I've left the HELPCTX system in place, with the vague notion that it
might be a useful layer of indirection for some future help system on a
platform like Mac OS X.
(I've left the putty.hlp target in doc/Makefile, if nothing else because
this is a convenient test case for Halibut's WinHelp support. But the
resulting help file will no longer support context help.)
At the point when we change over the seat's trust status to untrusted
for the last time, to finish authentication, Plink will now present a
final interactive prompt saying 'Press Return to begin session'. This
is a hint that anything after that that resembles an auth prompt
should be treated with suspicion, because _PuTTY_ thinks it's finished
authenticating.
This is of course an annoying inconvenience for interactive users, so
I've tried to reduce its impact as much as I can. It doesn't happen in
GUI PuTTY at all (because the trust sigil system is used instead); it
doesn't happen if you use plink -batch (because then the user already
knows that they _never_ expect an interactive prompt); and it doesn't
happen if Plink's standard input is being redirected from anywhere
other than the terminal / console (because then it would be pointless
for the server to try to scam passphrases out of the user anyway,
since the user isn't in a position to enter one in response to a spoof
prompt). So it should only happen to people who are using Plink in a
terminal for interactive login purposes, and that's not _really_ what
I ever intended Plink to be used for (which is why it's never had any
out-of-band control UI like OpenSSH's ~ system).
If anyone _still_ doesn't like this new prompt, it can also be turned
off using the new -no-antispoof flag, if the user is willing to
knowingly assume the risk.
The executables were already ignoring it.
This is a minimal change; PUTTY.HLP can still be built, and there's
still all the context IDs lying around.
Buildscr changes are untested.
