[PATCH] [1/1] Allow underscores in user environment string

Dan Fuhry dan at fuhry.com
Fri Jun 22 02:17:12 AEST 2018


Hi all,
I've noticed that OpenSSH 7.7 adds stricter validation of user
environment strings from authorized_keys files. While strict
validation is a good thing from a security perspective, this new
change specifically blocks underscores which are common to include in
a user environment string. This results in the key being rejected
outright. Including underscores in a user environment is a relatively
common use case, for example setting LC_ALL.

In our use case, we are using a perl script to fetch public keys from
LDAP and setting an environment variable with the user's LDAP
username, resulting in authorized_keys lines like:

  environment="LDAP_USER=jdoe" ssh-ed25519 ...

This generates a log message like:

  bad key options: invalid environment string

The attached patch is against the released openssh-7.7 nonportable
release, however my testing took place on a portable (Linux) system.
Given the simplicity of the patch I hope that is not an issue.

I am happy to add a test case for this if that would be appropriate.

Cross reference to Ubuntu bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssh/+bug/1771011

Regards,
Dan Fuhry
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