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.
This gets rid of all those annoying 'win', 'ux' and 'gtk' prefixes
which made filenames annoying to type and to tab-complete. Also, as
with my other recent renaming sprees, I've taken the opportunity to
expand and clarify some of the names so that they're not such cryptic
abbreviations.
