“The Terrapin attack is a novel cryptographic attack targeting the integrity of the SSH protocol, the first-ever practical attack of its kind, and one of the very few attacks against SSH at all. The attack exploits weaknesses in the specification of SSH paired with widespread algorithms, namely ChaCha20-Poly1305 and CBC-EtM, to remove an arbitrary number of protected messages at the beginning of the secure channel, thus breaking integrity. In practice, the attack can be used to impede the negotiation of certain security-relevant protocol extensions. Moreover, Terrapin enables more advanced exploitation techniques when combined with particular implementation flaws, leading to a total loss of confidentiality and integrity in the worst case.”
“Although we suggest backward-compatible countermeasures to stop our attacks, we note that the security of the SSH protocol would benefit from a redesign from scratch, guided by all findings and insights from both practical and theoretical security analysis, in a similar manner as was done for TLS 1.3.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Once in place, this piece of dedicated hardware surreptitiously inhaled thousands of user names and passwords before it was finally discovered.
Ylönen, who at the time knew little about implementing strong cryptography in code, set out to develop the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) in early 1995, about three months after the discovery of the password sniffer.
As one of the first network tools to route traffic through an impregnable tunnel fortified with a still-esoteric feature known as “public key encryption,” SSH quickly caught on around the world.
Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the protocol, which underpins the security of apps used inside millions of organizations, including cloud environments crucial to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other large companies.
Now, nearly 30 years later, researchers have devised an attack with the potential to undermine, if not cripple, cryptographic SSH protections that the networking world takes for granted.
The attack targets the BPP, short for Binary Packet Protocol, which is designed to ensure that adversaries with an active position can’t add or drop messages exchanged during the handshake.
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