Functionality

[Damien Miller]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001 carl at bl.echidna.id.au wrote:

> > 	ssh -l user host
> > 	su
> > 	<root password exposed to traffic analysis>
>
> Erm ... traffic analysis?  Where?
>
> Ssh is encrypted.

Not traffic sniffing - but you can still try to estimate password lengths
and infer a few liklihoods about what characters are used through keystroke
timings. This may be enough to make a brute-force search tractable.

Best read the advisory at
http://www.openwall.com/advisories/OW-003-ssh-traffic-analysis.txt

OpenSSH tries to prevent such attacks using the methods discussed in the
advisory.

-d

-- 
| Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> \ ``E-mail attachments are the poor man's
| http://www.mindrot.org          /   distributed filesystem'' - Dan Geer