Issue with OpenSSH remote forwarding of dynamic ports

[Ángel González]

On 08/08/13 06:22, Ron Frederick wrote:
>     When a connection comes to a port for which remote forwarding has
>     been requested, a channel is opened to forward the port to the other
>     side.
>
>        byte      SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN
>        string    "forwarded-tcpip"
>        uint32    sender channel
>        uint32    initial window size
>        uint32    maximum packet size
>        string    address that was connected
>        uint32    port that was connected
>        string    originator IP address
>        uint32    originator port
>
> I was expecting "port that was connected" in this message to be the dynamically allocated port so that it would always be a unique value, but this is not the case (at least with OpenSSH's sshd). Instead, it always seems to be the "port number to bind" value passed in the original SSH_MSG_GLOBAL_REQUEST "tcpip-forward" message (which is 0 since we're asking for a dynamic port).
>
> Unfortunately, I would imagine changing this behavior on the server side might break existing clients out there which are expecting to get this 0 value back in channel open requests when they set up a dynamic listener, and I don't really see a good way to resolve this. Does anyone have any suggestions?
It could pass 0 for the first forward and the real port in the next ones 
(which are already open), but IMHO the right thing would be to always 
provide the real port.