Researchers discover rare, hard-to-exploit OpenSSH vulnerability

Vulnerabilities in OpenSSH are rarely discovered, so when researchers from cybersecurity firm Qualys uncovered flaws in the widely used secure communications protocol, the security community was in an uproar.

According to Qualys, a vulnerability in the OpenSSH network tool affects around 14 million vulnerable instances, and experts are rushing to patch the bug before it can be exploited. The vulnerability, called regreSSHion, is severe and can be used to gain full access to affected systems or evade firewalls. The bug takes advantage of a timing issue that was fixed around 10 years ago but resurfaced in 2020. This phenomenon is called a “regression,” which is where the bug gets its name.

But experts warn that the bug, CVE-2024-6387, is difficult to exploit under the best of conditions and that most modern systems have defenses against this kind of attack.

Omkar Arasaratnam, general manager of the Open Source Security Foundation, said the researchers had to use specific laboratory conditions to make the intrusion successful.

“Qualys created a situation where they were able to do something in hours that might have taken weeks, and yet they relied on an intentionally fragile environment to do it,” Arasaratnam said, noting that it was impressive work to find bugs in a program that many considered “robust.”

OpenSSH said it took eight hours of continuous connectivity before they could replicate a successful attack.

Jake Williams, a former National Security Agency hacker and vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy, warned in an email that the seriousness of the bug should not be exaggerated: “The Internet is not on fire.”

“This disclosure also provides another opportunity to talk about the importance of zero trust — most organizations don't need to expose SSH to the entire internet,” Sullivan said.

Qualys hasn't published a proof-of-concept for the vulnerability, and so far there have been no publicly-available instances of successful exploitation, giving defenders time to mitigate the bug.

Still, the discovery of vulnerabilities in widely used open source software raises concerns that large numbers of systems will remain unpatched. Although the Log4Shell vulnerability was disclosed several years ago, vulnerable versions of the Log4j software are still in the wild and being exploited by state-sponsored hackers.

RegreSSHion only appears to affect 32-bit Linux systems, which are typically older computer systems that lack the latest security technology to block the bug, significantly reducing the number of affected systems.

Arasaratnam noted that the bug could be avoided by using memory-safe languages, and the move to memory-safe languages ​​is a key priority for the Biden Administration to make more secure the open source ecosystem on which the world's digital systems depend.

A series of critical vulnerabilities affecting open source software and malicious attempts to tamper with the maintenance of open source tools have raised concerns about the security of open source software. Both financially motivated criminals and nation-state sponsored hackers are targeting open source code and developers in order to infect victims further down the supply chain ecosystem.

This story was updated on July 3, 2024 to correct the spelling of Omkhar Arasaratnam's name.

Author: Christian Vasquez Christian covers industrial cybersecurity for CyberScoop News. He previously covered energy cybersecurity for POLITICO's E&E News. Contact him at christian.vasquez at cyberscoop dot com

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