A security regression (CVE-2006-5051) was discovered in OpenSSH's server (sshd). There is a race condition which can lead sshd to handle some signals in an unsafe manner. An unauthenticated, remote attacker may be able to trigger it by failing to authenticate within a set time period.

Last updated 18 September 2024

A race condition vulnerability was discovered in how signals are handled by OpenSSH's server (sshd). If a remote attacker does not authenticate within a set time period, then sshd's SIGALRM handler is called asynchronously. However, this signal handler calls various functions that are not async-signal-safe, for example, syslog(). As a consequence of a successful attack, in the worst case scenario, an attacker may be able to perform a remote code execution (RCE) as an unprivileged user running the sshd server.