PuTTY wish no-ssh1-fallback

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summary: Remove fallbacks between SSH-2 and SSH-1
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
fixed-in: 16dfefcbdedb00354860adb32034ac0f3791833c 2016-04-03 (0.68)

While it's still apparently necessary to support the obsolete SSH-1 protocol to connect to some outdated servers, these days it should really be treated as a separate and insecure protocol, like Telnet or Rlogin, and only used if the user explicitly requests it.

PuTTY currently supports a mode ('Preferred SSH protocol version' of '2' rather than '2 only') where it will prefer to use the modern SSH-2 protocol, but will quietly fall back to SSH-1 if that's all the server appears to support. PuTTY used in this mode is open to a protocol downgrade attack; while the SSH-2 protocol exchange is set up to spot an active attacker tampering with version strings, algorithm choices and the like (provided that you have been careful about trusting the host key), that can't prevent downgrade to SSH-1, and after that further downgrade attacks are possible.

While it is not yet known to be trivial to exploit this, SSH-1 is now sufficiently rare that it's not worth the risk.

(One sign that it might be happening to you is being unexpectedly prompted for a new "rsa" host key; this would not be flagged as "WARNING - POTENTIAL SECURITY BREACH". In PuTTY 0.67 and before, this can also occur legitimately in SSH-2 if the server adds a new host key type but the key type would not be "rsa", which is SSH-1 specific; "rsa2" is the name of the RSA key type for SSH-2.)

Current versions of PuTTY default to not allowing fallback to SSH-1, but the default only changed in 0.64 (early 2015), so there will be plenty of long-time users whose untouched settings leave them vulnerable to such a downgrade attack.

So: change "Preferred SSH protocol version" to just "SSH protocol version", and offer just two options "2" and "1", which behave the same way that "2 only" and "1 only" did in previous versions. (The '-2' and '-1' command-line options already behave like this.) Existing sessions that use the old settings instead use the equivalent no-fallback behaviour. The net result is that a PuTTY configuration that permits SSH-1 can no longer be used to connect to a server that only supports SSH-2, leaving it open to a downgrade attack in the future.

Most users will be connecting to SSH-2-supporting servers with a configuration that prefers SSH-2 (the default since 0.54 in 2004) so will see no change. If you were relying on the fallback, your session will now fail and you'll have to change your settings to explicitly acknowledge the protocol version in use; if you discover that you need SSH-1, you might want to try to upgrade your server if possible.

(Compare Debian's approach, where you will also have to explicitly opt in to allowing SSH-1 by invoking the 'ssh1' command instead of 'ssh'.)


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Audit trail for this wish.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2017-04-28 16:52:45 +0100)