Ian Jackson recently tried to use the recipe in the psusan manpage for
talking to UML, and found that the connection was not successfully set
up, because at some point during startup, UML read the SSH greeting
(ok, the bare-ssh-connection greeting) from its input fd and threw it
away. So by the time psusan was run by the guest init process, the
greeting wasn't there to be read.
Ian's report: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=991958
I was also able to reproduce this locally, which makes me wonder why I
_didn't_ notice it when I originally wrote that part of the psusan man
page. It worked for me before, honest! But now it doesn't.
Anyway. The ssh verstring module already has a mode switch to decide
whether we ought to send our greeting before or after waiting for the
other side's greeting (because that decision varies between client and
server, and between SSH-1 and SSH-2). So it's easy to implement an
override that forces it to 'wait for the server greeting first'.
I've added this as yet another bug workaround flag. But unlike all the
others, it can't be autodetected from the server's version string,
because, of course, we have to act on it _before_ seeing the server's
greeting and version string! So it's a manual-only flag.
However, I've mentioned it in the UML section of the psusan man page,
since that's the place where I _know_ people are likely to need to use
this flag.
Suggested by Manfred Kaiser, who also wrote most of this patch
(although outlying parts, like documentation and SSH-1 support, are by
me).
This is a second line of defence against the kind of spoofing attacks
in which a malicious or compromised SSH server rushes the client
through the userauth phase of SSH without actually requiring any auth
inputs (passwords or signatures or whatever), and then at the start of
the connection phase it presents something like a spoof prompt,
intended to be taken for part of userauth by the user but in fact with
some more sinister purpose.
Our existing line of defence against this is the trust sigil system,
and as far as I know, that's still working. This option allows a bit of
extra defence in depth: if you don't expect your SSH server to
trivially accept authentication in the first place, then enabling this
option will cause PuTTY to disconnect if it unexpectedly does so,
without the user having to spot the presence or absence of a fiddly
little sigil anywhere.
Several types of authentication count as 'trivial'. The obvious one is
the SSH-2 "none" method, which clients always try first so that the
failure message will tell them what else they can try, and which a
server can instead accept in order to authenticate you unconditionally.
But there are two other ways to do it that we know of: one is to run
keyboard-interactive authentication and send an empty INFO_REQUEST
packet containing no actual prompts for the user, and another even
weirder one is to send USERAUTH_SUCCESS in response to the user's
preliminary *offer* of a public key (instead of sending the usual PK_OK
to request an actual signature from the key).
This new option detects all of those, by clearing the 'is_trivial_auth'
flag only when we send some kind of substantive authentication response
(be it a password, a k-i prompt response, a signature, or a GSSAPI
token). So even if there's a further path through the userauth maze we
haven't spotted, that somehow avoids sending anything substantive, this
strategy should still pick it up.
If we're publishing the server, then we should say something about the
fact that this option exists to talk to it. Also, if the option exists
on the front page at all in a released version of PuTTY, it behooves
us to document it slightly more usefully than just a handwave at 'this
is specialist and experimental'.
SUPDUP came, at my insistence, with a history section in the docs
for people who hadn't heard of it. It seems only fair that the
other obsolete network protocols (or, at least, the ones we *wish*
were obsolete :-) should have the same kind of treatment.
Moved the Raw protocol to below Serial, so that the first two
sections are SSH and Serial, matching the (now very emphatic)
priority order in the config UI.
Similarly, reordered the bullet points in \k{config-hostname}.
I've filled in some text about prime generation methods and Ed448,
which were all the things marked as 'review before release'.
While I'm at it, also filled in a reasonable enough DSA key length
recommendation, because the FIXME comment in that section was within
sight of one of the places I was editing. FIPS 186-4 seemed to think
that RSA and DSA had comparable relationships between the key length
and practical security level, so I see no reason not to use the same
recommendation for both key types.
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.
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.
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.)
It is useful to be able to exclude the header so that the log file
can be used for realtime input to other programs such as Kst for
plotting live data from sensors.
Thanks to Jiri Kaspar for sending this patch (apart from the new docs
section, which is in my own words), which implements a feature we've
had as a wishlist item ('utf8-plus-vt100') for a long time.
I was actually surprised it was possible to implement it in so few
lines of code! I'd forgotten, or possibly never noticed in the first
place, that even in UTF-8 mode PuTTY not only accepts but still
_processes_ all the ISO 2022 control sequences and shift characters,
and keeps running track of all the same state in term->cset and
term->cset_attrs that it tracks in IS0-2022-enabled modes. It's just
that in UTF-8 mode, at the very last minute when a character+attribute
pair is about to be written into the terminal's character buffer, it
deliberately ignores the contents of those variables.
So all that was needed was a new flag checked at that last moment
which causes it not quite to ignore them after all, and bingo,
utf8-plus-vt100 is supported. And it works no matter which ISO 2022
sequences you're using; whether you're using ESC ( 0 to select the
line drawing set directly into GL and ESC ( B to get back when you're
done, or whether you send a preliminary ESC ( B ESC ) 0 to get GL/GR
to be ASCII and line drawing respectively so you can use SI and SO as
one-byte mode switches thereafter, both work just as well.
This implementation strategy has a couple of consequences, which I
don't think matter very much one way or the other but I document them
just in case they turn out to be important later:
- if an application expecting this mode has already filled your
terminal window with lqqqqqqqqk, then enabling this mode in Change
Settings won't retroactively turn them into the line drawing
characters you wanted, because no memory is preserved in the screen
buffer of what the ISO 2022 state was when they were printed. So
the application still has to do a screen refresh.
- on the other hand, if you already sent the ESC ( 0 or whatever to
put the terminal _into_ line drawing mode, and then you turn on
this mode in Change Settings, you _will_ still be in line drawing
mode, because the system _does_ remember your current ISO 2022
state at all times, whether it's currently applying it to output
printing characters or not.
The former has advantages in terms of keeping Kerberos credentials up
to date, but it also does something sufficiently weird to the usual
SSH host key system that I think it's worth making sure users have a
means of turning it off separately from the less intrusive GSS
userauth.
This was originally sent in as part of the GSSAPI patch, but I've
extracted into a separate commit because that patch was more than
complicated enough by itself.
This is a heavily edited (by me) version of a patch originally due to
Nico Williams and Viktor Dukhovni. Their comments:
* Don't delegate credentials when rekeying unless there's a new TGT
or the old service ticket is nearly expired.
* Check for the above conditions more frequently (every two minutes
by default) and rekey when we would delegate credentials.
* Do not rekey with very short service ticket lifetimes; some GSSAPI
libraries may lose the race to use an almost expired ticket. Adjust
the timing of rekey checks to try to avoid this possibility.
My further comments:
The most interesting thing about this patch to me is that the use of
GSS key exchange causes a switch over to a completely different model
of what host keys are for. This comes from RFC 4462 section 2.1: the
basic idea is that when your session is mostly bidirectionally
authenticated by the GSSAPI exchanges happening in initial kex and
every rekey, host keys become more or less vestigial, and their
remaining purpose is to allow a rekey to happen if the requirements of
the SSH protocol demand it at an awkward moment when the GSS
credentials are not currently available (e.g. timed out and haven't
been renewed yet). As such, there's no need for host keys to be
_permanent_ or to be a reliable identifier of a particular host, and
RFC 4462 allows for the possibility that they might be purely
transient and only for this kind of emergency fallback purpose.
Therefore, once PuTTY has done a GSS key exchange, it disconnects
itself completely from the permanent host key cache functions in
storage.h, and instead switches to a _transient_ host key cache stored
in memory with the lifetime of just that SSH session. That cache is
populated with keys received from the server as a side effect of GSS
kex (via the optional SSH2_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY message), and used if
later in the session we have to fall back to a non-GSS key exchange.
However, in practice servers we've tested against do not send a host
key in that way, so we also have a fallback method of populating the
transient cache by triggering an immediate non-GSS rekey straight
after userauth (reusing the code path we also use to turn on OpenSSH
delayed encryption without the race condition).
Rewrite the "Using PuTTY" section for 'clipboard-generality', and also
explain why we default to mouse-based selection, interaction with other
applications via PRIMARY when running PuTTY on Unix, and bracketed-paste
mode. Also add lots of index terms.
On all platforms, you can now configure which clipboard the mouse
pastes from, which clipboard Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins access, and which
Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V access. In each case, the options are:
- nothing at all
- a clipboard which is implicitly written by the act of mouse
selection (the PRIMARY selection on X, CLIP_LOCAL everywhere else)
- the standard clipboard written by explicit copy/paste UI actions
(CLIPBOARD on X, the unique system clipboard elsewhere).
Also, you can control whether selecting text with the mouse _also_
writes to the explicitly accessed clipboard.
The wording of the various messages changes between platforms, but the
basic UI shape is the same everywhere.
This makes space in the Selection panel (at least on Windows; it
wasn't overfull on Unix) to add a new set of config options
controlling the mapping of UI actions to clipboards.
(A possible future advantage of having spare space in this new Words
panel is that there's room to add controls for context-sensitive
special-casing, e.g. I'd quite like ':' to be treated differently when
it appears as part of "http://".)
I know some users don't like any colour _at all_, and we have a
separate option to turn off xterm-style 256-colour sequences, so it
seems remiss not to have an option to disable true colour as well.
2ce0b680c inadvertently removed this ability in trying to ensure that
everyone got the new IUTF8 mode by default; you could remove a mode from
the list in the UI, but this would just revert PuTTY to its default.
The UI and storage have been revamped; the storage format now explicitly
says when a mode is not to be sent, and the configuration UI always
shows all modes known to PuTTY; if a mode is not to be sent it now shows
up as "(don't send)" in the list.
Old saved settings are migrated so as to preserve previous removals of
longstanding modes, while automatically adding IUTF8.
(In passing, this removes a bug where pressing the 'Remove' button of
the previous UI would populate the value edit box with garbage.)
Also try to upgrade the settings of people who haven't changed the
defaults; but anyone who has, or anyone who's used the pre-release
snapshots with elliptic-curve support, will have to review their
settings manually.
The UI now only has "1" and "2" options for SSH protocol version, which
behave like the old "1 only" and "2 only" options; old
SSH-N-with-fallback settings are interpreted as SSH-N-only.
This prevents any attempt at a protocol downgrade attack.
Most users should see no difference; those poor souls who still have to
work with SSH-1 equipment now have to explicitly opt in.
Now we actually have enough of them to worry about, and especially
since some of the types we support are approved by organisations that
people might make their own decisions about whether to trust, it seems
worth having a config list for host keys the same way we have one for
kex types and ciphers.
To make room for this, I've created an SSH > Host Keys config panel,
and moved the existing host-key related configuration (manually
specified fingerprints) into there from the Kex panel.
