Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

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One of the biggest differences is that if you're using password auth, and you are tricked into connecting to a malicious server, that server now has your plaintext password and can impersonate you to other servers.

If you use a different strong random password for every single server, this attack isn't a problem, but that adds a lot of management hassle compared to using a single private key. (It's also made more difficult by host key checking, but let's be honest, most of us don't diligently check the fingerprints every single time we get a mismatch warning.)

In contrast, if you use an SSH key, then a compromised server never actually gets a copy of your private key unless you explicitly copy it over. (If you're have SSH agent forwarding turned on, then during the compromised connection, the server can run a "confused deputy" attack to authenticate other connections using your agent's identity. But it loses that ability when you disconnect.)

Not a rhetorical question: couldn't the malicious server relay the challenge from a valid server for to you to sign, and impersonate you that way?

No, these schemes use the pub/private keys to setup symmetric crypto, so just passing it along does you no good because what follows is a bunch of stuff encrypted by a session key only the endpoints know.

If I am a server and have your public key in an authorized_keys file, I can just encrypt a random session key using that and only you will be able to decrypt it to finish setting up the session.

This is why passwords and asymmetric crypto are worlds apart in security guarantees.

If a man in the middle relays a public key challenge, that will indeed result in a valid connection, but the connection will be encrypted such that only the endpoints (or those who possess a private key belonging to one of the endpoints) can read the resulting traffic. So the man in the middle is simply relaying an encrypted conversation and has no visibility into the decrypted contents.

The man in the middle can still perform denial of service, by dropping some or all of the traffic.

The man in the middle could substitute their own public key in place of one of the endpoint's public keys, but if each endpoint knows the other endpoint's key and is expecting that other key, then an unexpected substitute key will raise a red flag.

> if you're using password auth, and you are tricked into connecting to a malicious server, that server now has your plaintext password and can impersonate you to other servers.

Why would the password be sent in plaintext instead of, say, sending a hash of the password calculated with a salt that is unique per SSH server? Or something even more cryptographically sound.

In fact, passwords in /etc/shadow already do have random salts, so why aren't these sent over to the SSH client so it can send a proper hash instead of the plaintext password?

If the hash permits a login then having a hash is essentially equivalent to having a password. The malicious user wouldn't be able to use it to sudo but they could deploy some other privilege escalation once logged in.

It's a little bit more complicated than just sending a hash of the password, but there are ways to authenticate using hashed passwords without sending the password over the wire, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr...

Even so, these protocols require the server to know your actual password, not just a hash of the password, even though the password itself never traverses the network. So a compromised server can still lead to a compromised credential, and unless you use different passwords for every server, we're back to the same problem.

Asymmetric PAKEs don't require the server to know your password. You and the server need to have a discussion to establish some parameters that work for your chosen password, without revealing what it is, and then in future you can supply evidence that you indeed know the password (that is, some value which satisfies the agreed parameters), still without revealing what it is. This is not easy to do correctly, whereas it's really easy to get it wrong...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-cfrg-opaque/

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