Remote Root Exploit In lsh

Ha-Ha by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-20 18:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

I find it entertaining that the GNU zealot hippies suggest lsh as a replacement. That's like suggesting that the HURD is a replacement for the Linux kernel. Always trying to one-up the *BSD people by making something "more free", but never living up to the hype.

BTW, *who* uses lsh????

Can someone explain to me why.. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-20 18:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

We have a GNU ordained version of the SSH protocols when OpenSSH is doing a fantastic job?

Even if you are going to argue the BSD vs. GPL license issue, the lsh devs could have just taken the OpenSSH code, made some slight changes, and re-released it under the GPL.

So again I ask: Why?

Telnet by Henry+V+.009 · 2003-09-20 18:28 · Score: 4, Insightful

I was going to repeat "switch to Telnet joke" that I made last time, but I just can't get up will this time. These bugs are killing us. I seriously think that we need to take some time to consider how Open Source projects do security. The "more eyes" mantra doesn't cut it. We need security models, standards, testing, and god knows what else. We need to look at which projects have been successful, and which have been miserable security failures. I know the open source community can do a lot better.

Re:Telnet by daeley · 2003-09-20 18:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

While I would agree with you in the abstract that the open source community can do a lot better on some things, the bug was confirmed 2 days ago and patched immediately. Good software !== no bugs ever.

--
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Re:Telnet by ajs · 2003-09-20 19:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

These bugs are not killing us. In fact, they're helping us to make our code stronger.

I'm so sick of the "there are bugs in it, let's switch" mentallity. There are bugs in every piece of software ever written. Why? Because human beings have a hard time specifying exactly what they want.

Sometimes those bugs are dangerous (as in buffer overflows), but if you look at your average piece of source code long enough -- source of ANY number of lines -- I bet you can find a bug in it.

So, we should all switch to the abacus? No, we should all make sure we spend time and money on the problem of finding bugs before the black-hats do. And that's why I buy software like Red Hat... because they actually spend some of that money on auditing for security, and I like the results (many bugs found and killed).
Re:Telnet by TomV · 2003-09-20 20:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down

That's not the same as saying that good bridges have no faults. Bridges are built with a large safety factor. A large amount of the steel wire in the Brooklyn Bridge cables is hideously substandard, slipped in there by a currupt subcontractor. But because the safety factors were in place, even though the cables are probably about 5/6 as strong as they were designed to be, because they were designed to be 4 times as strong as strictly necessary, the Brooklyn Bridge is still there today. They paid for a lot more steel than strictly necessary, but they were proved right to have done so.

The bridge is Verifiably Strong Enough, but it certainly isn't Fault-Free. It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.

TomV

Still diversity is good. by Coryoth · 2003-09-20 18:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

Okay, there's a hole here, that's definitely bad. Still it would be nice if lsh could manage to gain some share of the ssh market. It has worried me for a while that OpenSSH has become the standard, which, unfortunately, creates a monoculture. A monoculture of ssh implementations is as vulnerable to massive infection as a monculture of windows boxes (okay, maybe windows has more holes, but its the massive part I'm concerned with).

If the market on ssh implementations was a little more split, it would be a little more difficult to write a worm that could wreak utter havoc. Repeat after me: Monoculture is bad.

Jedidiah.

--
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts

Re:Still diversity is good. by HermesHuang · 2003-09-20 18:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

Still, I'm not about to choose one implementation over another simply to add diversity. I'm going to pick the one I think is the best. Perhaps the reasons I use are wrong, and I probably don't know all the facts. But I tend to trust OpenSSH more then the other implementations. So I'm going to use OpenSSH. Period. I choose what I do because I don't want to deal with a worm at all. Not because I want to set things up so that when I do get a worm, it's only me and half of the sshd servers out there, rather then all of them. I acknowledge that diversity is good, but it's never going factor into my decisions regarding my security software.

Re:The standard conclusion by GammaTau · 2003-09-20 18:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Nothing is 100% secure, nothing is flawless, all operating systems are imperfect pieces of junk [...]

Which is why software monoculture is bad. The existence of competing implementations is always a good thing whether it's OpenSSH vs. GNU lsh or something else. That way not everything is compromised in one swoop once a new security flaw is discovered.

After 20+ years of buffer overflow exploits... by kcbrown · 2003-09-20 18:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

...you'd think that developers would finally know how to write software that doesn't have such vulnerabilities.

But unfortunately we don't seem to have made that much progress, despite the reasonably large number of development tools we have that address such issues (including anything from memory debuggers to string libraries). I mean, really ... people are still writing these things in C ... in the 21st century! I'm a big fan of picking the right tool for the job, but I think it should be clear by now that C isn't the right tool for writing secure software. There are simply too many ways to screw up.

I think it's time we started writing system software (that is, software which provides services but which runs as a process under the OS) in a language which doesn't have these problems. And if a suitable language is unavailable, that argues strongly for creating that language.

You might still have to worry about buffer overflow exploits against the kernel, but that's a much more manageable problem.

--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.

Re:After 20+ years of buffer overflow exploits... by Garen · 2003-09-20 18:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

Took the words right out of my mouth. For large scale software that's this critical, we really need more safety guarantees to achieve adequate confidence that it's secure. That rules out C.
Re:After 20+ years of buffer overflow exploits... by kcbrown · 2003-09-20 19:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'll agree that C lends itself to these things, but its the standard for a number of reasons, and frankly, anything else will introduce the same types of problems.

There will always be security vulnerabilities in software, of course. But buffer overflows are a class of vulnerabilities that simply shouldn't exist. C is unsuitable for system software because there are far too many ways (both subtle and gross) to wind up with buffer overflow bugs. It's what happens when the language is designed to make direct memory access easy.
You have to remember that C wasn't created to make writing system software easy, it was created to make writing operating systems easy. For that you have to be able to manipulate memory directly, and C is very well suited to that mission.
System software has different needs. It needs to be able to send and receive data, to manipulate strings, and to store and retrieve information from files, and do so securely. You may still need to manipulate buffers but that's a far cry from needing to manipulate memory directly. System software is very different from operating systems, and calls for a different language.

--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Re:After 20+ years of buffer overflow exploits... by vt0asta · 2003-09-21 02:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

First things, first. C was meant to be a highly portable version of assembly. C successfully facilatated porting operating systems AND applications that used those operating systems.

People often think of C the wrong way, and that is often because languages considered "safe" borrow heavily from C syntax. If you have ever programmed in assembly/machine language, you know the programming bugs can do quite nasty and unexplained things (sometimes much worse than a buffer overflow). However, having coded in assembly one often becomes more rigorous with their coding, that same rigor is what is needed to carry over to C, and is what is lacking with some of the C coders of today.

Second, system software also often needs a low memory footprint. System developers often want to know where every little bit of memory went, and often find compiled code barely tolerable. Not everyone can afford the luxury of loading a perl, python, java, byte code interpretor du jour just to send and read data, manipulate strings, and do stuff with files.
System software is very different from operating systems, and calls for a different language.
Maybe you're right, problem is, many have tried almost all have failed to gain popularity for systems coding. Big problem for your argument and for developers who know, almost all of those different languages were first written in...drum roll...."C".

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No.

hubris is never safe by Build6 · 2003-09-20 18:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

I remember reading the alert for the OpenSSH bug, where one of the options listed was to upgrade to lsh - not "change to", "try using", or anything of the sort, but "upgrade" - and I thought then that that demonstrated an unnecessarily... high-horse-y attitude. I'll bet they regret saying that now... . Humility really IS the best policy.

Re:I have to laugh by cduffy · 2003-09-20 19:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

looks don't mean jack or shit.

In code, looks mean quite a lot.

Cleaner, more readable code is easier to audit.
Cleaner, more readable code is easier to bugfix.
Cleaner, more readable code is easier to add features to.
Cleaner, more readable code is simply Good Stuff.

Smug. by Alioth · 2003-09-20 20:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

Serves those smug bastards right who were gloating the other day about how they use lsh and how it is so much better than OpenSSH. Hoist by their own petard, so it seems.

I _never_ gloat about running different software to $COMPROMISED_SW of the day. Just because I run exim, I don't think I'm magically more secure than a sendmail user. Exim users must keep up with the patches as well. Same goes for qmail. If you sit there smugly saying how superior your piece of software is, you're going to get bitten in the ass sooner or later, or at least end up looking very silly after all the gloating to find you're vulnerable too.

Dudes, doesn't matter what you run: don't gloat about it - be paranoid about the security of what you run, and keep up with the patches.

--
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows

lsh Pre-dates OpenSSH by divec · 2003-09-20 20:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

Does it exist solely because of the non-GNUness of other implementations?

When lsh was started, OpenSSH didn't exist. The original SSH was free till version 1.2.12, but was then put under a more restrictive licence. The licence on ssh version 2 was more restrictive still (I think it wasn't even free-as-in-beer). lsh was intended to be a Free, Open-Source replacement to ssh.

Then the OpenBSD people took the old, free 1.2.12 version of ssh, fixed all the known bugs which had accumulated since that release and updated it with the new features in the SSH protocol. This is OpenSSH.

--

perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'

The quality of Theos work by aliquis · 2003-09-20 20:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

Thought this is rather old news I never thought that anyone else could do an ssh application better then the one the openbsd team could bring out. I'm confident that they do their best and look thru the code very carefully and still this kind of things happen.
I find it strange that there never seems to be an end of the openssh, apache, php, sendmail and mysql vulnerabilities. I suppose it's just damn hard to write secure code all the time. I blame the C language a little for this, should you really have to be this careful all the time? Do you really have to reinvent the wheel every single time?
Imho c is just something you should use because the application you are editing already uses it or the teacher has told you so. There are lots of better languages out there. Can't understand all the complains on java for example.
Does anyone have some suggestions about libraries, special functions, compiler mods and so on which make C programs a little more secure? Any suggestions of other languages which is available for different platforms but more secure and with less reinventing of the wheel all the time? The ones which come to my mind are as I said java and scripting languages like python, ruby and so on. But there got to be atleast one which isn't interpreted?
Suggestions are more than welcome.

Maybe the standard Winlot conclusion by RoLi · 2003-09-20 21:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

nothing is flawless

Nobody ever claimed it would be.

However I've personally experienced that many systems are more secure than others. Almost all security problems on Unix didn't affect me (like this, BTW. This is actually the first time I've ever heard about lsh) and often were hyped up. In the meantime I get tens of Windows-Virus-mails and attemted IIS infections per day.

The true conclusion:

Windows is like a 50 year old car without safety belts, Unix is like a modern Volvo with safety belts and airbags.

Neither car is "flawless" and you can die in the Volvo too.

Re:Maybe the standard Winlot conclusion by Overly+Critical+Guy · 2003-09-21 05:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

Nobody ever claimed it would be.

You do visit Slashdot, don't you? It is claimed all the time. The prevailing attitude and anecdotal evidence about how secure Linux is and how insecure and unstable Windows is runs through every discussion thread even remotely involving anything Microsoft. A large part of this site is just reactive hysteria to "Microsoft worms." Heck, whenever there's an X-Box article, you get the requisite hundreds of "jokes" about green screens of death.

You claim to get virus-mails, which usually require user intervention to spread. Then you mention IIS intrusions, despite the fact that Slashdot recently posted an article called "Linux Most Attacked Server?" which showed Linux was the most breached operating system on the net.

The true conclusion:

Windows is like a 50 year old car without safety belts, Unix is like a modern Volvo with safety belts and airbags.

No. The true conclusion is that your personal disdain for Microsoft products in an OS war doesn't matter in the end. All operating systems are insecure and vulnerable. They are equal.

The true heart of security lies in your system administrator. Period.

--
"Sufferin' succotash."

Re:How thoughtful by skookum · 2003-09-20 23:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

Do you honestly think that the kind of people that would want to use such an exploit would actually learn about it from slashdot? Don't you think they'd know how to find the BugTraq archives themselves?

Do you honestly think that by pretending that an exploit doesn't exist you're any safer? Do you think you will patch your systems (and urge your supervisors to grant you the priority to patch those systems) faster knowing that an exploit is easily available? Do you not agree that it doesn't matter whether you feel good or bad about the situation, what matters is how fast and to what extent all vulnerable systems are patched? Do you not think that knowing of an exploit helps that goal?

Re:The standard conclusion by ScrewMaster · 2003-09-21 01:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

I might add that this philosophy applies to organic systems as well, and for the same reason. A sufficient degree of diversity in any population, whether it be microbes, human beings, or operating systems, helps assure that no single pathogen can be totally destructive. Certainly, in this modern age of world-wide non-OS-specific internetworking protocols and data interchange formats, we should promote operating-system diversity as an additional level of safety.

I see many large corporations enforcing enterprise-wide standards. That is, everyone will run the same version of Windows, with the same applications software, same service packs, same anti-virus and firewall software ... which just means that when one machine does get compromised the entire organization is at risk. On the other hand, this situation is very convenient from the IT professional's point of view, so there is some argument for it. But I maintain that having a mix of operating systems, applications and protective software can provide more security than a more homogenous approach, and security is what we all want, right? Right?

--
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.

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