Regarding Pubkey Enumeration

Dan Kaminsky dan at doxpara.com
Fri Jan 20 20:18:47 EST 2012


HD Moore from MetaSploit has noted that, given a pubkey (and not the
corresponding private key, as might be found in authorized_keys), he can
determine if he'd be able to log into an account.

It's a small thing, but he's using it for very interesting
recon/deanonymization.  He'll be releasing a paper shortly, not overplaying
the characteristic, but certainly showing it can be used to do cute things.

I expect this is easily fixable -- simply provide the challenge for a
pubkey whether or not it'd actually be able to log in successfully.  But
it's worth exploring this space -- perhaps some clients behave badly.

--Dan


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