A malicious server could send a specially crafted packet which could result in an unchecked integer overflow. The value would then be used to allocate memory causing a possible memory write out of bounds error.

Last updated 30 June 2026

A server could send a specially crafted SSH packet with a padding length value greater than the packet length. This would result in a buffer read out of bounds when decompressing the packet or result in a corrupted packet value.

An out of bounds read flaw was discovered in libssh2 before 1.8.1 in the way SFTP packets with empty payloads are parsed. A remote attacker who compromises a SSH server may be able to cause a Denial of Service or read data in the client memory.

A server could send a specially crafted SSHMSGCHANNELREQUEST packet with an exit status message and no payload. This would result in an out of bounds memory comparison.

An out of bounds read flaw was discovered in libssh2 before 1.8.1 in the libssh2packetrequire and libssh2packetrequirev functions. A remote attacker who compromises a SSH server may be able to cause a Denial of Service or read data in the client memory.

A server could send a specially crafted partial SFTP packet with a zero value for the payload length. This zero value would be used to then allocate memory resulting in a zero byte allocation and possible out of bounds read.

A flaw was found in libssh2 before 1.8.1 creating a vulnerability on the SSH client side. A server could send a multiple keyboard interactive response messages whose total length are greater than unsigned char max characters. This value is used by the SSH client as an index to copy memory causing in an out of bounds memory write error.

A server could send a SSHMSGCHANNELREQUEST packet with an exit signal message with a length of max unsigned integer value. The length would then have a value of 1 added to it and used to allocate memory causing a possible memory write out of bounds error or zero byte allocation.

A server could send a value approching unsinged int max number of keyboard prompt requests which could result in an unchecked interger overflow. The value would then be used to allocate memory causing a possible memory write out of bounds error.

Last updated 4 September 2026

Last updated 4 September 2026

Last updated 30 June 2026

Last updated 13 July 2026

Last updated 13 July 2026

Last updated 30 June 2026

In libssh2 before 1.9.0, kexmethoddiffiehellmangroupexchangesha256keyexchange in kex.c has an integer overflow that could lead to an out-of-bounds read in the way packets are read from the server. A remote attacker who compromises a SSH server may be able to disclose sensitive information or cause a denial of service condition on the client system when a user connects to the server. This is related to an libssh2checklength mistake, and is different from the various issues fixed in 1.8.1, such as CVE-2019-3855.

In libssh2 v1.9.0 and earlier versions, the SSHMSGDISCONNECT logic in packet.c has an integer overflow in a bounds check, enabling an attacker to specify an arbitrary (out-of-bounds) offset for a subsequent memory read. A crafted SSH server may be able to disclose sensitive information or cause a denial of service condition on the client system when a user connects to the server.

libssh2 Heap Buffer Overflow via ETM Cipher Negotiation

libssh2 Heap Out-of-Bounds Read via publickey subsystem

An issue was discovered in function libssh2packetadd in libssh2 1.10.0 allows attackers to access out of bounds memory.

A security vulnerability has been detected in libssh2 up to 1.11.1. The impacted element is the function userauthpassword of the file src/userauth.c. Such manipulation of the argument usernamelen/passwordlen leads to integer overflow. The attack may be launched remotely. The name of the patch is 256d04b60d80bf1190e96b0ad1e91b2174d744b1. A patch should be applied to remediate this issue.

A security vulnerability has been detected in libssh2 up to 1.11.1. The impacted element is the function userauthpassword of the file src/userauth.c. Such manipulation of the argument usernamelen/passwordlen leads to integer overflow. The attack may be launched remotely. The name of the patch is 256d04b60d80bf1190e96b0ad1e91b2174d744b1. A patch should be applied to remediate this issue.

The kexagreemethods function in libssh2 before 1.5.0 allows remote servers to cause a denial of service (crash) or have other unspecified impact via crafted length values in an SSHMSGKEXINIT packet.

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.

The diffiehellmansha256 function in kex.c in libssh2 before 1.7.0 improperly truncates secrets to 128 or 256 bits, which makes it easier for man-in-the-middle attackers to decrypt or intercept SSH sessions via unspecified vectors, aka a "bits/bytes confusion bug."

libssh2 through 1.11.1 reads an attacker-controlled 32-bit attribute count from a publickey-subsystem response and uses it in the allocation numattrs sizeof(libssh2publickeyattribute) without bounds checking, so on 32-bit platforms the multiplication overflows to an undersized buffer. A malicious SSH server can then drive the attribute-parsing loop to write past the allocation, causing a heap buffer overflow in a connecting libssh2 client.

libssh2 through 1.11.1, fixed in commit 5e47761, contains a double-free vulnerability in the sftpopen() function in src/sftp.c that allows a malicious SSH server to corrupt the heap of any authenticated client opening an SFTP session. When a server responds to SSHFXPOPEN with SSHFXPSTATUS containing FXOK, the response data buffer is freed, and if a subsequent sftppacketrequire() call returns a specific error such as LIBSSH2ERRORCHANNELPACKETEXCEEDED, the same pointer is freed a second time, enabling tcache dup conditions on glibc systems that allow overlapping allocations and function pointer overwrites.

libssh2 through 1.11.1, fixed in commit a13bb6c, contains a missing bounds check vulnerability that allows a malicious SSH server to trigger an arbitrary-length heap out-of-bounds read and a free of an uninitialized pointer via the publickey subsystem. In libssh2publickeylistfetch(), the version 1 response parser reads a server-controlled commentlen value and advances the parse pointer without verifying sufficient bytes remain in the buffer, causing the out-of-bounds read to leak heap pointers from adjacent allocations defeating ASLR, followed by heap allocator state corruption when the error cleanup path frees an uninitialized pointer from a non-zeroed realloc() region.

Fabian Bäumer, Marcus Brinkmann, Jörg Schwenk discovered that the SSH protocol was vulnerable to a prefix truncation attack. If a remote attacker was able to intercept SSH communications, extension negotiation messages could be truncated, possibly leading to certain algorithms and features being downgraded. This issue is known as the Terrapin attack. This update adds protocol extensions to mitigate this issue.