Un recent academic study demonstrated how it is possible, for an attacker, intercept the SSH connections of some devices and, with some luck, impersonate those devices after secretly discovering the hosts' private RSA keys. This type of attack, known as “man-in-the-middle,” allows the attacker to silently observe users' login details and monitor their activities with remote SSH servers. SSH is commonly used to access and control a device via a command line interface, although other uses exist.
Host private RSA keys can be obtained by passively surveilling connections from clients to a vulnerable device's SSH server: accidental or natural computational errors during signature generation can be observed and exploited to calculate the SSH server's private key, ideally secret .
Natural errors refer to those caused by cosmic rays and other small faults that alter bits, while accidental errors are due to poorly implemented RSA signature generation algorithms. You might think that the former are so rare that they are not realistically exploitable and that the latter would already be known, but rest assured that by monitoring enough SSH connections to a vulnerable SSH server, you will end up seeing an exploitable connection.
It is important to note that the OpenSSL and LibreSSL software libraries, and therefore OpenSSH, are not known to be vulnerable to this method of key deduction. This means, in our opinion, that the vast majority of devices, servers and other equipment on the Internet are not at risk, and what remains are some Internet-of-Things devices and similar embedded equipment susceptible to attack. This only affects RSA keys.
The study was conducted by Keegan Ryan, Kaiwen He, George Arnold Sullivan, and Nadia Heninger of the University of California, San Diego (Kaiwen He is also at MIT). The technique the team uses to discern private RSA keys stems from TLS-smashing research by Florian Weimer in 2015 and 2022 work by some of the authors of the San Diego paper, as well as research dating back to the 90s.
Thomas Ptacek, an Infosec expert, shared a summary of the RSA key document here, for an easy-to-understand explanation of the issue. Thanks also go to Dan Goodin, former Register journalist, who reported the document via Ars Technica.
When a client connects to a vulnerable SSH server, during their negotiations to establish secure, encrypted communications, the server generates a digital signature that the client verifies to ensure it is talking to the server it expects.
This signature generation can be interrupted randomly or accidentally, as described above, so that intelligent algorithms can infer from the erroneous signature the server's private RSA key, used in signature generation. One countermeasure is to ensure that the signature is correct before issuing it to the client; OpenSSL and LibreSSL already do this.
The authors of the study stated:
We demonstrate that a passive attacker can opportunistically obtain host-private RSA keys from an SSH server that suffers a natural error during signature computation. Previously, it was believed that this was not possible for the SSH protocol because the signature included information such as the Diffie-Hellman shared secret that would not be available to a passive network observer. We show that for commonly used signature parameters for SSH, there is an efficient grid attack to recover the private key in case of a signature failure. We provide a security analysis of the SSH, IKEv1, and IKEv2 protocols in this scenario and use our attack to discover hundreds of compromised keys worldwide from different vulnerable implementations independently.
A passive adversary can silently monitor legitimate connections without risk of detection until it observes a faulty signature that exposes the private key. The attacker can then actively and undetectably impersonate the compromised host to intercept sensitive data.
The researchers said they looked at the Internet and examined previously collected SSH scan data to measure the prevalence of vulnerable signatures, and said their dataset of approximately 5,2 billion SSH records, spanning more than seven years of observations, contained more than 590.000 invalid RSA signatures.
Using theirs lattice key recovery technique the academics said that more than 4.900 of those faulty signatures revealed the factorization of the corresponding RSA public key, which they used to derive the private RSA keys for 189 of those public keys.
During their research, the authors discovered four manufacturers whose products were vulnerable to this type of key investigation: Cisco, Zyxel, Hillstone Networks, and Mocana. The researchers disclosed the issue to Cisco and Zyxel, and note that both vendors “promptly investigated.”
Cisco determined that its ASA and FTD software resolved the issue in 2022, and prior to the document's publication, it was "investigating mitigations" for IOS and IOS XE software.
Meanwhile, Zyxel concluded that the flaw only affected its end-of-life firmware and that it had started using non-vulnerable OpenSSL at that point. The researchers say they were unable to contact Hillstone Networks and Mocana and instead referred the issue to the CERT Coordination Center.
An SSH server implementation declaring itself as “SSH-2.0-SSHD” is also said to be vulnerable, and this could be used by some enterprise-level Java applications. Since the key deduction technique revolves around PKCSv1.5, DNSSEC using PKCSv1.5-RSA signatures may also be at risk.
They also noted that the dataset of signatures in IPsec connections was not large enough to conclude whether this protocol is vulnerable to such a key leak: “Given the rarity of vulnerable signature flaws, we are unable to conclude much about IPsec implementations from our data and believe this question merits further study."
