I've had more than one conversation recently in which users have
mentioned finding this mode inconvenient. I don't know whether any of
them would want to turn it off completely, but it seems likely that
_somebody_ will, sooner or later. So here's an option to do that.
Someone just asked us a question which suggests they might have thought
they need to supply both files in the 'Public-key authentication' box in
the config dialog, to use public-key authentication at all. I can see
why someone might think that, anyway.
For serial connections, &H generally expanded to the empty string.
This seems more useful.
(It so happens that &H _could_ expand to the serial line if it came from
the command-line, but that's accidental.)
When you send a "publickey" USERAUTH_REQUEST containing a certified
RSA key, and you want to use a SHA-2 based RSA algorithm, modern
OpenSSH expects you to send the algorithm string as
rsa-sha2-NNN-cert-v01@openssh.com. But 7.7 and earlier didn't
recognise those names, and expected the algorithm string in the
userauth request packet to be ssh-rsa-cert-v01@... and would then
follow it with an rsa-sha2-NNN signature.
OpenSSH itself has a bug workaround for its own older versions. Follow
suit.
For years I've been following the principle that before I'll add
auto-detection of an SSH server bug, I want the server maintainer to
have fixed the bug, so that the list of affected version numbers
triggering the workaround is complete, and to provide an incentive for
implementations to gradually converge on rightness.
*Finally*, I've got round to documenting that policy in public, for
the Feedback page!
(cherry picked from commit b5645f79dd)
The previous name, which included '(quantum-resistant)', was too long to
be completely seen in the Windows config dialog's kex list (which is
narrower than the Gtk one, due to the Up/Down buttons). No point
including that explanation if people can't actually read it, so we'll
have to rely on docs to explain it.
(I did try squashing the rest of the name to "SNTRUP/X25519 hybrid", but
that wasn't enough.)
As some sort of compensation, index it more thoroughly in the docs, and
while I'm there, tweak the indexing of other key exchange algorithms
too.
GUI Pageant stopped using SSH identifiers for key types in fea08bb244,
but the docs were still referring to them.
As part of this, ensure that the term "NIST" is thoroughly
cross-referenced and indexed, since it now appears so prominently in
Pageant.
(While I'm there, reword the "it's OK that elliptic-curve keys are
smaller than RSA ones" note, as I kept tripping over the old wording.)
With the new larger fixed-group methods, it's less clearly always the
right answer. (Really it seems more sensible to use ECDH over any of
the integer DH, these days.)
Also, reword other kex descriptions a bit.
In recent months I've had two requests from different people to build
support into PuTTY for automatically handling complicated third-party
auth protocols layered on top of keyboard-interactive - the kind of
thing where you're asked to enter some auth response, and you have to
refer to some external source like a web server to find out what the
right response _is_, which is a pain to do by hand, so you'd prefer it
to be automated in the SSH client.
That seems like a reasonable thing for an end user to want, but I
didn't think it was a good idea to build support for specific
protocols of that kind directly into PuTTY, where there would no doubt
be an ever-lengthening list, and maintenance needed on all of them.
So instead, in collaboration with one of my correspondents, I've
designed and implemented a protocol to be spoken between PuTTY and a
plugin running as a subprocess. The plugin can opt to handle the
keyboard-interactive authentication loop on behalf of the user, in
which case PuTTY passes on all the INFO_REQUEST packets to it, and
lets it make up responses. It can also ask questions of the user if
necessary.
The protocol spec is provided in a documentation appendix. The entire
configuration for the end user consists of providing a full command
line to use as the subprocess.
In the contrib directory I've provided an example plugin written in
Python. It gives a set of fixed responses suitable for getting through
Uppity's made-up k-i system, because that was a reasonable thing I
already had lying around to test against. But it also provides example
code that someone else could pick up and insert their own live
response-provider into the middle of, assuming they were happy with it
being in Python.
We've occasionally had reports of SSH servers disconnecting as soon as
they receive PuTTY's KEXINIT. I think all such reports have involved
the kind of simple ROM-based SSH server software you find in small
embedded devices.
I've never been able to prove it, but I've always suspected that one
possible cause of this is simply that PuTTY's KEXINIT is _too long_,
either in number of algorithms listed or in total length (especially
given all the ones that end in @very.long.domain.name suffixes).
If I'm right about either of those being the cause, then it's just
become even more likely to happen, because of all the extra
Diffie-Hellman groups and GSSAPI algorithms we just threw into our
already-long list in the previous few commits.
A workaround I've had in mind for ages is to wait for the server's
KEXINIT, and then filter our own down to just the algorithms the
server also mentioned. Then our KEXINIT is no longer than that of the
server, and hence, presumably fits in whatever buffer it has. So I've
implemented that workaround, in anticipation of it being needed in the
near future.
(Well ... it's not _quite_ true that our KEXINIT is at most the same
length as the server. In fact I had to leave in one KEXINIT item that
won't match anything in the server's list, namely "ext-info-c" which
gates access to SHA-2 based RSA. So if we turn out to support
absolutely everything on all the server's lists, then our KEXINIT
would be a few bytes longer than the server's, even with this
workaround. But that would only cause trouble if the server's outgoing
KEXINIT was skating very close to whatever buffer size it has for the
incoming one, and I'm guessing that's not very likely.)
((Another possible cause of this kind of disconnection would be a
server that simply objects to seeing any KEXINIT string it doesn't
know how to speak. But _surely_ no such server would have survived
initial testing against any full-featured client at all!))
I recently noticed a mysterious delay at connection startup while
using an SSH jump host, and investigated it in case it was a bug in
the new jump host code that ought to be fixed before 0.77 goes out.
strace showed that at the time of the delay PuTTY was doing a DNS
lookup for the destination host, which was hanging due to the
authoritative DNS server in question not being reachable. But that was
odd, because I'd configured it to leave DNS lookup to the proxy,
anticipating exactly that problem.
But on closer investigation, the _proxy_ code was doing exactly what
I'd told it. The DNS lookup was coming from somewhere else: namely, an
(unsuccessful) attempt to set up a GSSAPI context. The GSSAPI library
had called gethostbyname, completely separately from PuTTY's own use
of DNS.
Simple workaround for me: turn off GSSAPI, which doesn't work for that
particular SSH connection anyway, and there's no point spending 30
seconds faffing just to find that out.
But also, if that puzzled me, it's worth documenting!
This update covers several recently added features: SSH proxying, HTTP
Digest proxy auth, and interactive prompting for proxy auth in general.
Also, downplayed the use of 'plink -nc' as a Local-type proxy command.
It still works, but it's no longer the recommended way of tunnelling
SSH over SSH, so there's no need to explain it quite so
enthusiastically.
This is the same as the previous FUNKY_XTERM mode if you don't press
any modifier keys, but now Shift or Ctrl or Alt with function keys
adds an extra bitmap parameter. The bitmaps are the same as the ones
used by the new SHARROW_BITMAP arrow key mode.
This commit introduces a new config option for how to handle shifted
arrow keys.
In the default mode (SHARROW_APPLICATION), we do what we've always
done: Ctrl flips the arrow keys between sending their most usual
escape sequences (ESC [ A ... ESC [ D) and sending the 'application
cursor keys' sequences (ESC O A ... ESC O D). Whichever of those modes
is currently configured, Ctrl+arrow sends the other one.
In the new mode (SHARROW_BITMAP), application cursor key mode is
unaffected by any shift keys, but the default sequences acquire two
numeric arguments. The first argument is 1 (reflecting the fact that a
shifted arrow key still notionally moves just 1 character cell); the
second is the bitmap (1 for Shift) + (2 for Alt) + (4 for Ctrl),
offset by 1. (Except that if _none_ of those modifiers is pressed,
both numeric arguments are simply omitted.)
The new bitmap mode is what current xterm generates, and also what
Windows ConPTY seems to expect. If you start an ordinary Command
Prompt and launch into WSL, those are the sequences it will generate
for shifted arrow keys; conversely, if you run a Command Prompt within
a ConPTY, then these sequences for Ctrl+arrow will have the effect you
expect in cmd.exe command-line editing (going backward or forward a
word). For that reason, I enable this mode unconditionally when
launching Windows pterm.
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.
