Call for testing: OpenSSH 7.8

Fri Aug 10 11:16:34 AEST 2018

Hi,

OpenSSH 7.8p1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing
on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

Snapshot releases for portable OpenSSH are available from
http://www.mindrot.org/openssh_snap/

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

Portable OpenSSH is also available via git using the
instructions at http://www.openssh.com/portable.html#cvs
At https://anongit.mindrot.org/openssh.git/ or via a mirror at Github:
https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable

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

$ ./configure && make tests

Live testing on suitable non-production systems is also appreciated.
Please send reports of success or failure to
openssh-unix-dev at mindrot.org. Security bugs should be reported
directly to openssh at openssh.com.

Below is a summary of changes. More detail may be found in the ChangeLog
in the portable OpenSSH tarballs.

Thanks to the many people who contributed to this release.

Potentially-incompatible changes
================================

This release includes a number of changes that may affect existing
configurations:

 * ssh-keygen(1): write OpenSSH format private keys by default
   instead of using OpenSSL's PEM format. The OpenSSH format,
   supported in OpenSSH releases since 2014 and described in the
   PROTOCOL.key file in the source distribution, offers substantially
   better protection against offline password guessing and supports
   key comments in private keys. If necessary, it is possible to write
   old PEM-style keys by adding "-m PEM" to ssh-keygen's arguments
   when generating or updating a key.

 * sshd(8): remove internal support for S/Key multiple factor
   authentication. S/Key may still be used via PAM or BSD auth.

 * ssh(1): remove vestigal support for running ssh(1) as setuid. This
   used to be required for hostbased authentication and the (long
   gone) rhosts-style authentication, but has not been necessary for
   a long time. Attempting to execute ssh as a setuid binary, or with
   uid != effective uid will now yield a fatal error at runtime.

 * sshd(8): the semantics of PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes and the similar
   HostbasedAcceptedKeyTypes options have changed. These now specify
   signature algorithms that are accepted for their respective
   authentication mechanism, where previously they specified accepted
   key types. This distinction matters when using the RSA/SHA2
   signature algorithms "rsa-sha2-256", "rsa-sha2-512" and their
   certificate counterparts. Configurations that override these
   options but omit these algorithm names may cause unexpected
   authentication failures (no action is required for configurations
   that accept the default for these options).

 * sshd(8): the precedence of session environment variables has
   changed. ~/.ssh/environment and environment="..." options in
   authorized_keys files can no longer override SSH_* variables set
   implicitly by sshd.

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): the default IPQoS used by ssh/sshd has changed.
   They will now use DSCP AF21 for interactive traffic and CS1 for
   bulk.  For a detailed rationale, please see the commit message:
   https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/readconf.c#rev1.284

Changes since OpenSSH 7.7
=========================

This is primarily a bugfix release.

New Features
------------

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): add new signature algorithms "rsa-sha2-256-cert-
   v01 at openssh.com" and "rsa-sha2-512-cert-v01 at openssh.com" to
   explicitly force use of RSA/SHA2 signatures in authentication.

 * sshd(8): extend the PermitUserEnvironment option to accept a
   whitelist of environment variable names in addition to global
   "yes" or "no" settings.

 * sshd(8): add a PermitListen directive to sshd_config(5) and a 
   corresponding permitlisten= authorized_keys option that control
   which listen addresses and port numbers may be used by remote
   forwarding (ssh -R ...).

 * sshd(8): add some countermeasures against timing attacks used for
   account validation/enumeration. sshd will enforce a minimum time
   or each failed authentication attempt consisting of a global 5ms
   minimum plus an additional per-user 0-4ms delay derived from a
   host secret.

 * sshd(8): add a SetEnv directive to allow an administrator to
   explicitly specify environment variables in sshd_config.
   Variables set by SetEnv override the default and client-specified
   environment.

 * ssh(1): add a SetEnv directive to request that the server sets
   an environment variable in the session. Similar to the existing
   SendEnv option, these variables are set subject to server
   configuration.

 * ssh(1): allow "SendEnv -PATTERN" to clear environment variables
   previously marked for sending to the server. bz#1285

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): make UID available as a %-expansion everywhere
   that the username is available currently. bz#2870

 * ssh(1): allow setting ProxyJump=none to disable ProxyJump
   functionality. bz#2869

Bugfixes
--------

 * all: substantial internal refactoring

 * sshd(8): avoid observable differences in request parsing that could
   be used to determine whether a target user is valid.

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): fix some memory leaks; bz#2366

 * ssh(1): fix a pwent clobber (introduced in openssh-7.7) that could
   occur during key loading, manifesting as crash on some platforms.

 * sshd_config(5): clarify documentation for AuthenticationMethods
   option; bz#2663

 * ssh(1): ensure that the public key algorithm sent in a
   public key SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST matches the content of the
   signature blob. Previously, these could be inconsistent when a
   legacy or non-OpenSSH ssh-agent returned a RSA/SHA1 signature
   when asked to make a RSA/SHA2 signature.

 * sshd(8): fix failures to read authorized_keys caused by faulty
   supplemental group caching. bz#2873

 * scp(1): apply umask to directories, fixing potential mkdir/chmod
   race when copying directory trees bz#2839

 * ssh-keygen(1): return correct exit code when searching for and
   hashing known_hosts entries in a single operation; bz#2772

 * ssh(1): prefer the ssh binary pointed to via argv[0] to $PATH when
   re-executing ssh for ProxyJump. bz#2831

 * sshd(8): do not ban PTY allocation when a sshd session is
   restricted because the user password is expired as it breaks
   password change dialog. (regression in openssh-7.7).

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): fix error reporting from select() failures. 

 * ssh(1): improve documentation for -w (tunnel) flag, emphasising
   that -w implicitly sets Tunnel=point-to-point. bz#2365

 * ssh-agent(1): implement EMFILE mitigation for ssh-agent. ssh-agent
   will no longer spin when its file descriptor limit is exceeded.
   bz#2576

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): disable SSH2_MSG_DEBUG messages for Twisted Conch
   clients. Twisted Conch versions that lack a version number in
   their identification strings will mishandle these messages when
   running on Python 2.x (https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/9422)

 * sftp(1): notify user immediately when underlying ssh process dies
   expectedly. bz#2719

 * ssh(1)/sshd(8): fix tunnel forwarding; regression in 7.7 release.
   bz#2855

 * ssh-agent(1): don't kill ssh-agent's listening socket entirely if
   it fails to accept(2) a connection. bz#2837

 * sshd(8): relax checking of authorized_keys environment="..."
   options to allow underscores in variable names (regression
   introduced in 7.7). bz#2851

 * ssh(1): add some missing options in the configuration dump output
   (ssh -G). bz#2835

Portability
-----------

 * sshd(8): Expose details of completed authentication to PAM auth
   modules via SSH_AUTH_INFO_0 in the PAM environment. bz#2408

 * Fix compilation problems caused by fights between zlib and OpenSSL
   colliding uses of "free_func"

 * Improve detection of unsupported compiler options. Recently these
   may have manifested as "unsupported -Wl,-z,retpoline" warnings
   during linking.

 * sshd(8): some sandbox support for Linux/s390 bz#2752.

 * regress tests: unbreak key-options.sh test on platforms without
   openpty(3). bz#2856

 * use getrandom(2) for PRNG seeding when built without OpenSSL.

OpenSSH is brought to you by Markus Friedl, Niels Provos, Theo de
Raadt, Kevin Steves, Damien Miller, Darren Tucker, Jason McIntyre,
Tim Rice and Ben Lindstrom.