OpenSSH Turns Five Years Old

heydrick writes "The OpenSSH project is five years old. Project member Damien Miller writes, 'Five years ago, in late September 1999, the OpenSSH project was started. It began with an audit, cleanup and update of the last free version of Tatu Ylonen's legacy ssh-1.2.12 code. The project quickly gathered pace, attracting a portability effort and, in early 2000, an independent implementation of version 2 of the SSH protocol. Since then, OpenSSH has led in the implementation of proactive security techniques such as privilege separation & auto-reexecution.' Yaa for OpenSSH."

Comments

This story turns 8 months old

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's a dupe, too. Remember when editors actually read submissions?

5 years since the first *release*

[heatdeath]

The project was first released as OpenSSH 5 years ago today. The project was started, however, much earlier than that.

5 years since OpenSSH 2.0

[ikkibr]

From openssh.com: "With the OpenBSD 2.6 release out of the way, Markus Friedl decided to pursue SSH 2 protocol support. Slaving away for months, he managed to keep OpenSSH slim and lean, while at the same time managing to turn it into a single piece of software that could do both the SSH 1 and SSH 2 protocols. This version, called OpenSSH 2.0, shipped with OpenBSD 2.7 on June 15, 2000. Most of the checking of Markus' changes were done by Niels Provos and Theo de Raadt. Bob Beck is to be thanked for updating OpenSSL to a newer version."

They are also trying to get publicity.

[Some Random Username]

Yes, SSL and SSH are vulnerable to MITM attacks if used incorectly. This is not news, and has been known for years. Trying to pretend this is new and interesting and "easily crackable" is dishonest.

Re:auto-reexecution?

[slavemowgli]

From the Changelog for OpenSSH 3.9:

Make sshd(8) re-execute itself on accepting a new connection. This security measure ensures that all execute-time randomisations are reapplied for each connection rather than once, for the master process' lifetime. This includes mmap and malloc mappings, shared library addressing, shared library mapping order, ProPolice and StackGhost cookies on systems that support such things.

Hope this helps. :)

Re:Ettercap team claim SSH / SSL is easy crackable

[kasperd]

Would it be practical to have a summetric cipher with 4094 bit encryption, or would that make things run a bit slow?

256 bit AES use 14 rounds with a 128 bit key in each round. Rather than generating the 1792 bit keyschedule from the 256 bit key, you could just use a 1792 bit key. The speed would be the same as 256 bit AES. But don't expect it to be much more secure.

Most likely the cipher isn't the weakest point anyway. If you want to have 256 bits of entropy in your password you need aproximately 42 random characters.