Summary

Terrapin is a prefix truncation attack targeting the SSH protocol. More precisely, Terrapin breaks the integrity of SSH's secure channel. By carefully adjusting the sequence numbers during the handshake, an attacker can remove an arbitrary amount of messages sent by the client or server at the beginning of the secure channel without the client or server noticing it.

Mitigations

To mitigate this protocol vulnerability, OpenSSH suggested a so-called "strict kex" which alters the SSH handshake to ensure a Man-in-the-Middle attacker cannot introduce unauthenticated messages as well as convey sequence number manipulation across handshakes.

Warning: To take effect, both the client and server must support this countermeasure.

As a stop-gap measure, peers may also (temporarily) disable the affected algorithms and use unaffected alternatives like AES-GCM instead until patches are available.

Details

The SSH specifications of ChaCha20-Poly1305 (chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com) and Encrypt-then-MAC (-etm@openssh.com MACs) are vulnerable against an arbitrary prefix truncation attack (a.k.a. Terrapin attack). This allows for an extension negotiation downgrade by stripping the SSHMSGEXTINFO sent after the first message after SSHMSGNEWKEYS, downgrading security, and disabling attack countermeasures in some versions of OpenSSH. When targeting Encrypt-then-MAC, this attack requires the use of a CBC cipher to be practically exploitable due to the internal workings of the cipher mode. Additionally, this novel attack technique can be used to exploit previously unexploitable implementation flaws in a Man-in-the-Middle scenario.

The attack works by an attacker injecting an arbitrary number of SSHMSGIGNORE messages during the initial key exchange and consequently removing the same number of messages just after the initial key exchange has concluded. This is possible due to missing authentication of the excess SSHMSGIGNORE messages and the fact that the implicit sequence numbers used within the SSH protocol are only checked after the initial key exchange.

In the case of ChaCha20-Poly1305, the attack is guaranteed to work on every connection as this cipher does not maintain an internal state other than the message's sequence number. In the case of Encrypt-Then-MAC, practical exploitation requires the use of a CBC cipher; while theoretical integrity is broken for all ciphers when using this mode, message processing will fail at the application layer for CTR and stream ciphers.

For more details see https://terrapin-attack.com.

Impact

This attack targets the specification of ChaCha20-Poly1305 (chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com) and Encrypt-then-MAC (-etm@openssh.com), which are widely adopted by well-known SSH implementations and can be considered de-facto standard. These algorithms can be practically exploited; however, in the case of Encrypt-Then-MAC, we additionally require the use of a CBC cipher. As a consequence, this attack works against all well-behaving SSH implementations supporting either of those algorithms and can be used to downgrade (but not fully strip) connection security in case SSH extension negotiation (RFC8308) is supported. The attack may also enable attackers to exploit certain implementation flaws in a man-in-the-middle (MitM) scenario.

A path disclosure vulnerability was found in Samba. As part of the Spotlight protocol, Samba discloses the server-side absolute path of shares, files, and directories in the results for search queries. This flaw allows a malicious client or an attacker with a targeted RPC request to view the information that is part of the disclosed path.

A vulnerability was found in Samba's SMB2 packet signing mechanism. The SMB2 packet signing is not enforced if an admin configured "server signing = required" or for SMB2 connections to Domain Controllers where SMB2 packet signing is mandatory. This flaw allows an attacker to perform attacks, such as a man-in-the-middle attack, by intercepting the network traffic and modifying the SMB2 messages between client and server, affecting the integrity of the data.

A flaw was found in Keystone. There is a time lag (up to one hour in a default configuration) between when security policy says a token should be revoked from when it is actually revoked. This could allow a remote administrator to secretly maintain access for longer than expected.

A NULL pointer dereference, or possible use-after-free flaw was found in Samba AD LDAP server in versions before 4.10.17, before 4.11.11 and before 4.12.4. Although some versions of Samba shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux do not support Samba in AD mode, the affected code is shipped with the libldb package. This flaw allows an authenticated user to possibly trigger a use-after-free or NULL pointer dereference. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

All samba versions 4.9.x before 4.9.18, 4.10.x before 4.10.12 and 4.11.x before 4.11.5 have an issue where if it is set with "log level = 3" (or above) then the string obtained from the client, after a failed character conversion, is printed. Such strings can be provided during the NTLMSSP authentication exchange. In the Samba AD DC in particular, this may cause a long-lived process(such as the RPC server) to terminate. (In the file server case, the most likely target, smbd, operates as process-per-client and so a crash there is harmless).