this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Bit of an alarmist headline here. The vulnerability has been patched in the most common clients (openssh) and it was because the protocol wasn't being implemented correctly. To say that the SSH protocol "just got a lot weaker" is just not true.
It doesn't look that simple to me. From the Terrapin paper:
It seems the protocol itself needs a revision and implementation-specific patches are easier and less-than-ideal solutions.
One could argue that even these solutions they provide are already changes to the protocol, and not just fixes to implementation bugs. Both the Sequence Number Reset and Full Transcript Hash add or change functionality at the communication protocol level, rather than simply covering corner cases.
Yeaaaa, a complete redesign from scratch sounds way more dangerous. “Noah, get the boat” isn’t always the best answer. There’s been a lot of thought and testing put into the magnificent work that is SSH over the past few decades.
I won't pretend I know better than the paper authors, what I can say is that some fixes are not incremental.
There are cases that mature tools and protocols should be left behind, and the danger lies exactly in using a protocol that was designed in the web 1.0 era.