The framebuffer device model's maximum resolution constants were duplicated between the framebuffer and RFB modules and had gotten out of sync. Additionally, writes to the framebuffer BAR could set arbitrary width and height values without validation, and the framebuffer BAR I/O and RFB rendering threads were not synchronized.

A malicious guest can crash the bhyve process or potentially execute arbitrary code in the host userspace context running the virtual machine, subject to bhyve's Capsicum sandbox.

The HDA audio device model did not check for zero-length Buffer Descriptor List (BDL) entries when starting a stream. A zero-length entry caused an out-of-bounds read or write during DMA transfer processing. BDL fields were also subject to modification by the guest after validation.

A malicious guest can crash the bhyve process or potentially execute arbitrary code in the host userspace context running the virtual machine, subject to bhyve's Capsicum sandbox.

The xHCI (USB 3) device model did not validate or save the event ring size provided by the guest. The size was re-read from guest memory on each use, and Transfer Request Block (TRB) fields were loaded without protection against concurrent modification by the guest. This race condition could be triggered by a guest running malicious, privileged code.

A malicious guest can crash the bhyve process or potentially execute arbitrary code in the host userspace context running the virtual machine, subject to bhyve's Capsicum sandbox.

When an audio channel's buffer needs to be resized, the sound(4) driver checks that the buffer is not memory-mapped and then drops the channel lock to allocate a new buffer. An mmap(2) call on another thread can complete during this window, after which the resize path frees the now-mapped buffer without rechecking.

An unprivileged local user with access to a sound device can exploit this race to trigger a use-after-free in the kernel, potentially escalating privileges.

When the PCM sample array needs to grow, the RACK stack doubles a 16-bit allocation counter. Repeated doublings caused the counter to wrap to zero, resulting in a near-zero-length allocation followed by a copy of the existing samples into the undersized buffer. A remote peer can trigger the expansion by sending a sufficient number of ACKs on an established connection.

A remote attacker who can establish a TCP connection to a system using the RACK stack can trigger an out-of-bounds write of approximately 512 KB in the kernel heap possibly resulting in a kernel panic.

The IPv6 UDP send path for unconnected sockets did not apply the jail policy of rewriting a loopback destination address to the jail's primary IPv6 address.

A process in a classic (non-VNET) jail can send UDP datagrams to services listening on the host's IPv6 loopback address, bypassing jail network isolation.

SCMRIGHTS file descriptor passing did not preserve FDRESOLVEBENEATH when a descriptor was transferred. A process could clear the restriction by sending the descriptor to itself over a Unix domain socket.

A process in a jail that has received a directory file descriptor from another jail can use these techniques to escape the jail's filesystem root restriction.

renameat(2) did not enforce FDRESOLVEBENEATH on its directory arguments. A jailed process could rename a directory relative to a restricted descriptor, then escape the jail root via fchdir(2). This requires the directory to reside on a filesystem that is also reachable from the jail's root.

A process in a jail that has received a directory file descriptor from another jail can use these techniques to escape the jail's filesystem root restriction.

When fdescfs(4) was mounted in a jail with the "nodup" option, opening /dev/fd/N returned a descriptor that did not inherit FDRESOLVEBENEATH or the Capsicum capability rights of descriptor N.

A process in a jail that has received a directory file descriptor from another jail can use these techniques to escape the jail's filesystem root restriction.

kqueueforkcopyknote() indexed into the child's file descriptor table using a knote's file descriptor number without a bounds check. Because the child's table is copied before knotes are transferred, a concurrent thread in the parent could grow the parent's table and register knotes with file descriptor numbers beyond the end of the child's table, causing an out-of-bounds read.

An unprivileged local user may be able to exploit these races to escalate privileges.

When copying knotes from a parent kqueue to a child, the copy code did not correctly exclude marker knotes (used internally to track list traversal position) before marking them as in-flux and releasing the kqueue lock. If another thread freed a marker while the lock was dropped, the subsequent in-flux decrement operated on freed memory.

An unprivileged local user may be able to exploit these races to escalate privileges.

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.

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.

Last updated 25 August 2025

An issue was discovered in OpenSSH 7.9. Due to the scp implementation being derived from 1983 rcp, the server chooses which files/directories are sent to the client. However, the scp client only performs cursory validation of the object name returned (only directory traversal attacks are prevented). A malicious scp server (or Man-in-The-Middle attacker) can overwrite arbitrary files in the scp client target directory. If recursive operation (-r) is performed, the server can manipulate subdirectories as well (for example, to overwrite the .ssh/authorizedkeys file).

BZ2decompress in decompress.c in bzip2 through 1.0.6 has an out-of-bounds write when there are many selectors.

An OpenSSL TLS server may crash if sent a maliciously crafted renegotiation ClientHello message from a client. If a TLSv1.2 renegotiation ClientHello omits the signaturealgorithms extension (where it was present in the initial ClientHello), but includes a signaturealgorithmscert extension then a NULL pointer dereference will result, leading to a crash and a denial of service attack. A server is only vulnerable if it has TLSv1.2 and renegotiation enabled (which is the default configuration). OpenSSL TLS clients are not impacted by this issue. All OpenSSL 1.1.1 versions are affected by this issue. Users of these versions should upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.1k. OpenSSL 1.0.2 is not impacted by this issue. Fixed in OpenSSL 1.1.1k (Affected 1.1.1-1.1.1j).

OpenSSL could allow a remote attacker to bypass security restrictions, caused by a a missing check in the validation logic of X.509 certificate chains by the X509VFLAGX509STRICT flag. By using any valid certificate or certificate chain to sign a specially crafted certificate, an attacker could bypass the check that non-CA certificates must not be able to issue other certificates and override the default purpose.

Server or client applications that call the SSLcheckchain() function during or after a TLS 1.3 handshake may crash due to a NULL pointer dereference as a result of incorrect handling of the "signaturealgorithmscert" TLS extension. The crash occurs if an invalid or unrecognised signature algorithm is received from the peer. This could be exploited by a malicious peer in a Denial of Service attack. OpenSSL version 1.1.1d, 1.1.1e, and 1.1.1f are affected by this issue. This issue did not affect OpenSSL versions prior to 1.1.1d. Fixed in OpenSSL 1.1.1g (Affected 1.1.1d-1.1.1f).

A new exploitation technique called key reinstallation attacks used to break Wi-Fi handshakes that negotiate session keys was discovered. These attacks target the Wi-Fi/WPA2 standard. An adversary can trick a client or Access Point (AP) into reinstalling an already-in use pairwise key in 4-way handshake. While reinstalling the already in-use key, the associated packet number (sometimes also called nonce) and receive replay counter is reset. This causes nonce reuse, voiding any security the underlying encryption protocol is supposed to provide. For example, it allows decryption or injection of frames, and enables an attacker to replay frames.

When a process calls execve(2) to execute a setuid or setgid image, hwpmc(4) is supposed to detach PMCs owned by unprivileged processes. An inverted check meant that this scenario was not handled properly.

An unprivileged local user who has attached PMCs to a process can continue monitoring it after the process executes a setuid or setgid binary, contrary to the intended policy.

The SOCKSTREAM receive path in the unix socket implementation failed to fully detach control messages from the socket buffer before processing them. Some error paths would free those messages, leaving freed data mbufs in the receive socket buffer.

An unprivileged local user can exploit this use-after-free to escalate privileges.

The implementation of this ioctl attempts to acquire locks on all channels in a sync group. If locking a channel would block, it releases the sync group list lock and sleeps. Upon reawakening, it is possible that the sync group structure is freed, but the implementation did not handle this possibility.

On a system with a multiple audio devices, an unprivileged local user can exploit this use-after-free to escalate privileges.

In FreeBSD 15.0, the kernel structure used to represent user credentials changed: previously the primary group ID was stored in the first element of the array containing the list of supplementary group IDs, whereas now the primary group ID is stored in a dedicated field. This change was largely internal to the kernel and not user-visible.

One function, groupisprimary(), was not properly updated as a part of this transition. This function is used by macdo to determine the primary group ID of the credential after applying a transition rule, used when the rule target does not explicitly specify a group.

As a result, with certain macdo rules, it is possible for a credential switch to incorrectly set the primary group ID to the ID stored in the first element of the original credential's supplementary group array.

If the list of supplementary groups is empty, this value will be 0, corresponding to the "wheel" group. For example, a rule such as "uid=1001>uid=1002" can be abused to set the primary group ID to 0 even if the process did not originally belong to group 0.

Certain macdo rules can be abused to set a process' group ID to 0. Note however, that the rule must apply to the caller in order for the bug to be triggered, e.g., given the ruleset "uid=1001>uid=1002", the user must have user ID 1001 in order to trigger the bug.

Further, logged-in users will in general have a non-empty supplementary group list, in which case the bug can at worst be used to set the credential's first supplementary group ID as its primary group ID. Processes must explicitly remove themselves from all supplementary groups, using the privileged setgroups(2) system call, in order to exploit the bug to set 0 as the primary group ID.

Since membership in group 0 is often used to enable controlled privilege escalation, the bug might be further exploitable to obtain root privileges, depending on the system configuration. For instance, a ruleset such as the following could be exploited by a process running as user 1001 and with an empty supplementary group list: "uid=1001>uid=1002;gid=0>uid=0".

The TIOCSCTTY ioctl handler drops the tty lock in order to acquire the process tree lock. After reacquiring the tty lock, the handler did not revalidate the state of the terminal, and could proceed to link a terminal that was concurrently being destroyed to the calling process' session.

An unprivileged local user can exploit this race condition to escalate privileges.

The FIOSSHMLPGCNF ioctl(2) operation configures the page size for a largepage shared memory object. This is intended to be used immediately after creating the object, before any memory is allocated for the object. The handler checked whether a page size had already been configured without holding the rangelock. Two concurrent callers could both observe an unconfigured object and set conflicting page sizes, leaving the object in an inconsistent state.

An unprivileged local user can exploit this race to escalate privileges.

The setlocale function in FreeBSD 5.0 and earlier, and possibly other OSes, allows local users to read arbitrary files via the LANG environmental variable.

opiepasswd in One-Time Passwords in Everything (OPIE) in FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE-p22 through 6.1-STABLE before 20060322 uses the getlogin function to determine the invoking user account, which might allow local users to configure OPIE access to the root account and possibly gain root privileges if a root shell is permitted by the configuration of the wheel group or sshd.

Format string vulnerability in pwerror function in BSD libutil library allows local users to gain root privileges via a malformed password in commands such as chpass or passwd.

Format string vulnerability in top program allows local attackers to gain root privileges via the "kill" or "renice" function.