[openssh-unix-announce] Call for release testing

[Damien Miller]

Hi,

We would like to make one of our periodic releases shortly, so once
again we are asking for readers of this list (or anyone else) to
download and test a CVS snapshot of OpenSSH on your favourite
platforms.

The OpenBSD version is available in CVS HEAD:
http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html

Portable snapshots are available the mirrors listed at
http://www.openssh.com/portable.html#ftp in the snapshots/
subdirectory

Please test! Running the regression tests supplied with Portable does
not require installation and is a simply:

$ ./configure && make tests

Testing on suitable non-production systems is also appreciated. Please
send reports of success or failure to openssh-unix-dev at mindrot.org.

Also, OpenSSH Portable has a (completely voluntary) configuration
survey. It will collect information about the platform and the
options OpenSSH was configured with and mail it to an archive. We
tried to be careful not to collect anything that might be considered
sensitive, however if anyone has any issues with the data collected
then please let us know).

The raw data will be available only to the development team, however
we may publish summary data at some point in the future. This data
will help us to better support your platforms.

You can view the data that is collected by running "make survey" and
looking at the file "survey" in the build dir. The data is not sent
until you explicitly request it ("make send-survey"). If you have any
doubts at all then ask us (or just don't send it).

Some of the changes in the coming release include:

  - Add a new compression method that delays the start of zlib
    compression until the user has been authenticated successfully. The
    new method "Compression=delayed" is on by default in the server.
    This eliminates the risk of another zlib vulnerability leading to
    a compromise of the server by a user without authentication
    credentials.

    NB. Older OpenSSH (<3.5) version have a bug which will cause them
    to refuse to connect to any server that does not offer compression
    when the client has compression requested. Since the new "delayed"
    server mode isn't supported by these older clients, they will
    refuse to connect to a new server unless compression is disabled
    (on the client end) or the original compression method is enabled
    on the server ("Compression=yes" in sshd_config)

  - Another round of proactive changes for signed vs unsigned integer
    bugs has been completed, including changing the atomicio() API to
    encourage safer programming. As a result of these changes, OpenSSH
    is now "gcc -Wsign-compare" clean on most platforms.

  - Added support for the improved arcfour cipher modes from
    draft-harris-ssh-arcfour-fixes-02. The improves the cipher's
    resistance to a number of attacks by discarding early keystream
    output.

  - Increase the default size of new RSA/DSA keys generated by
    ssh-keygen from 1024 to 2048 bits.

  - Many bugfixes and improvements to connection multiplexing,
    including:

    - Added ControlMaster=auto/autoask options to support opportunistic
      multiplexing (see the ssh_config(5) manpage for details).

    - The client will now gracefully fallback to starting a new TCP
      connection if it cannot connect to a specified multiplexing
      control socket

    - Added %h (target hostname), %p (target port) and %r (remote
      username) expansion sequences to ControlPath. Also allow
      ControlPath=none to disable connection multiplexing.

    - Implemented support for X11 and agent forwarding over multiplexed
      connections. Because of protocol limitations, the slave
      connections inherit the master's DISPLAY and SSH_AUTH_SOCK rather
      than distinctly forwarding their own.

  - The following bugs from http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/ were closed:

     #1025 - Correctly handle disabled special character in ttymodes
     #1054 - Don't terminate connection on getpeername() failure
     #1046 - AIX 5.3 Garbage on Login
     #623  - Don't use $HOME in manpages
     #829  - Don't allocate a tty if -n option is set
     #471  - Misleading error message if /dev/tty perms wrong
     #1033 - Fix compile-time warnings

  - Lots of other improvements and fixes. Please refer to the ChangeLog
    for details

Thanks to everyone who has contributed patches, problem or test reports.

Regards,
Damien Miller