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Overconfidence in SSH Protection
nitsudima writes to mention a post on the Informit site about the common misunderstandings surrounding SSH, and how well-intentioned admins may be creating holes in their own security by using it. From the article: "In UNIX, all things are files. To send network traffic, UNIX writes the traffic to the network device file. In this case, the connection to Box A (and that private key used for authentication) is a socket file. This file will shuttle the authentication traffic between Box A and Box P. So what's the risk? Maybe the hacker can't get a copy of the private key through the socket file, but something better (from his/her view) can be done. If the hacker has root on Box D, he or she can point a private copy of the agent forwarding software to that socket file and thereby point the authentication process to the administrator's credentials--the ones kept on the 'safe' intranet. What are the chances that the administrator has configured access to all the DMZ servers he controls?"
So all I need to do is to get a root access to a Linux server and I can spy normal users there? Whoah, now this is what I call news.
The key is not transmitted or sent to the socket file. This person does not understand anything about private key authentication and should return all of his certifications, and please stop posting stories by them, it is embarassing.
The article illustrated one very convoluted way to break your DMZ security, but failed to make the simple statement: don't trust anyone, not even root, on your DMZ hosts. Allow SSH logins into the DMZ, and allow the DMZ to pull files from private network patching servers, such as apt repositories, but don't allow anyone to SSH from the DMZ to the intranet. Assume the DMZ is cracked wide open and keystroke logging. No one is going to get past the DMZ by watching you type 'apt-get install squid' but they will by watching you type 'ssh root@creditcarddb.int' and then the root password.
... you can packet sniff the authentication process all day long and you won't get someone's private key.
Anyone who tunnels from the DMZ to a trusted host which can execute commands on a sensitive server can't see the forest for the trees. You've learned how to use SSH and tunnel, but you're lacking some basic common sense.
Also, I don't see what good a socket catching the authentication will do
That whole article seemed a bit of voodoo itself. Many incongruous statements, like "If the hacker has root on Box D, he or she can point a private copy of the agent forwarding software to that socket file and thereby point the authentication process to the administrator's credentials--the ones kept on the "safe" intranet."
What does that mean, exactly? You direct the authentication process to a socket file and point the process to the admin's credentials? If the socket is on the DMZ host, and the credentials are on the private network host, how can you point the authentication process to those credentials?
Maybe I'm stupid, but the article didn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Here's a summary for you:
User A on box foo:
foo> ssh-agent xterm
foo> ssh-add
* enters their pass key *
User A can now ssh to any box that has their public key in box:$HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys
User B (evul hacker with root on box foo):
foo# SSH_AGENT_PID=XXXX; export SSH_AGENT_PID
foo# SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-YYYY/ZZZZ; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
User B now can ssh to any box that User A can, as above.
(where XXXX, YYYY, and ZZZZ are determined by evul hacker)
Not quite. If you have broken into the DMZ, that's all you have. Even mildly competent sysadmins know not to trust the DMZ and therefore you do not automatically have access to the rest of the network, nor do you have access to any confidential documents.
The exploit mentioned in the article doesn't rely on ssh being configured to connect directly to root. It relies on the attacker having gained root access on the box being ssh'd to by the sysadmin. Once the sysadmin has ssh'd to the comnpromised box (as any user) the attacker can then ssh to any other box the sysadmin has configured to use agent forwarding.
Two solutions to prevent this compromise of the rest of the network:
1) Don't allow the DMZ box to ssh anywhere; firewall it off. There should be no need to ssh FROM the DMZ box, only TO it.
2) Use a different public/private key pair for each box. That way, if you didn't firewall the DMZ off it would still fail on the key authentication. The drawback of this is a) the attacker can still ssh to your admin box which contains all of the private keys and b) you lose most of the advantage of agent forwarding; the ability to ssh through a chain of boxes without any but the first needing to store the private key.
I suppose the underlying message in the article is "You REALLY can't trust anything in a DMZ that may have been compromised. ssh is a tool that can be turned against you if one of your machines is compromised."
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
Why the developers of ssh have an option to forbid agent forwarding. Isn't it off by default? I cite from "man ssh":
>>>
Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the
ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the
agent's Unix-domain socket) can access the local agent through
the forwarded connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material
from the agent, however they can perform operations on the keys
that enable them to authenticate using the identities loaded into
the agent.
So wha is slashdot running an article about something where there is an explicit one-paragraph long waring in the man page of program at the option in question.
Yes, no doutbt there are a lot of idiots around, who without understanding,do things which require semantics which leads to a security leak (there is abolutely no way if you want to initiate authenticatication from processes on a machine to avoid root to do the same - as log as you are not asked on the agent's side each time before authentication;
The article is about a common misconfiguration with regard to agent forwarding. The DMZ hosts aren't supposed to be safe, that's why they're in the DMZ and not in the intranet. The admin must assume that root on these machines is compromised. Consequently he doesn't store his private keys on any of the DMZ machines. But what many overlook, possibly because they don't use the feature, is agent forwarding. Once the admin has logged into a compromised DMZ host, access to his credentials is extended to the DMZ host by that ominous socket. The file itself never leaves the admin's computer, but if agent forwarding is enabled, root on the DMZ host can now point other hosts on the intranet to the authentication facility on the admin's computer. This misconfiguration enables the attacker to hop from the DMZ to the intranet. The correct way to avoid this is to disable agent forwarding (on the admin's computer, not just on the DMZ hosts, of course).
A few versions ago OpenSSH added a -c "Require confirmation to sign using identities" to ssh-add to take care of this. Or using something like SSHKeychain on OS X so it'll ask for confirmation for multi-hop auth, but not for connections direct from your trusted machine.