The reliance on LLMs is unfortunate. I bet this mystery could gave been solved much quicker by simply looking at the packet capture in Wireshark. The Wireshark dissectors are quite mature, SSH is covered fairly well.
> I bet this mystery could gave been solved much quicker by simply looking at the packet capture in Wireshark.
For some people who are used to using Wireshark and who know what to look for, probably yes. For the vast majority of even technical people, probably not.
In my case, I did a packet capture of a single keystroke using tcpdump and imported it into Wireshark and I get just over 200 'Client: encrypted packet' and 'Server: encrypted packet' entries. Nothing useful there at all. If I tcpdump the entire SSH connection setup from scratch I get just as much useful information - nothing - but, oddly, fewer packets than my one keystroke triggered.
So yeah, I dislike LLMs entirely and dislike the reliance on LLMs that we see today, but in this case the author learned a lot of interesting stuff and shared it with us, whereas without LLMs he might have just shrugged and moved on.
Try debugging that shit. Thats right, debugging interfaces aren't safe, by some wellakshually security goon.
You want a real fun one to debug, is a SAML login to a webapp, with internal Oauth passthrough between multiple servers. Sure, I can decrypt client-server stuff with tools, but server-server is damn near impossible. The tools that work break SSL, and invalidate validation of the ssl.
Yes, Esri products suck. Bad.
Having to MITM a connection to snoop it is annoying, but the alternative appears to be still using unencrypted protocols from the 1970s within the limitations of a 6502 to operate life-safety equipment.
But this goes back to the vendors not providing better tools in the first place. We shouldn't NEED to be picking apart packet streams to prove to some jackass tech support ticket that their code is FUBAR. They're basically outsourcing support to their customer or userbase and we tolerated it because it was more expedient.
Unfortunately, nothing exists for SSH (yet?). [2]
I do agree that if you design a protocol that enforces encryption, you should include some debugging interface. It is much more straightforward to do this by logging the session secrets on the endpoints rather than trying to break it through a man-in-the-middle, the main thing the protocol is protecting you against.
Particularly in today's political climate, encryption has only become more necessary.
Anyway, VMs should not have authentication, it makes access sooo much easier. Also drop your IPs while you're at it. Might be useful for debugging later.
Seems because dumping the session keys is not at all a common thing. It's just a matter of effort though - if someone put in the time to improve the SSH story for dissectors, most of the groundwork is there.
The author didn't, and used a general tool to their aid - why is that unfortunate?
My thinking was:
* Yes, I clearly know what tcpdump is / how to capture network traffic
* It has been several years since I have looked at a pcap
* I don't have wireshark installed on this computer
* I've done the thing where you decrypt TLS with wireshark exactly once, years ago, and I found it frustrating for reasons I can't remember[1]. Wasn't sure if I could do this with ssh
* When I started investigating this, I didn't remotely think that ssh was the root cause. I thought it was a quirk of my game
* I *did* make a client that printed out all the data it was receiving, but it was useless because it was operating at the wrong layer (e.g. it connected over SSH and logged the bytes SSH handed it)
* I'm experimenting with Claude Code a lot because it has a lot of hype and I would like to form an opinion
* Looking up flags is annoying
* Being able to tell an agent "look at this pcap and tell me what you see" is *cool*
And the big leap here was realizing that this was my SSH client and not a quirk of my game. The time at which I would have read the SSH spec was after I captured traffic from a regular SSH session and observed the same pattern; before that I was thinking about the problem wrong.
I don't think that this is unfortunate. In fact, I think I got what I wanted here (a better sense of Claude Code's strengths and weaknesses). You're right that an alternative approach would have taught me different things, and that's a worthy goal too.
[1] I suspect this is because I was doing it for an old job and I had to figure out how to run some application with keys I controlled? It would have been easier here. I don't remember.
I totally get being exhausted at LLMs. And I don't mind the nudge to be a little less lazy and install wireshark for next time.
hope I get you to play the game when it's out!
> there's no built-in decryption
Is that because wireshark can't do that just from packet captures?
Well, not quite. I think it's more that nobody has taken the time to implement it. That's not to say such an implementation would automatically decrypt the traffic from a capture with no extra leg work, of course. Wireshark dissectors have user configurable preferences, and presumably this would be where captured secrets could be set for use. This is how it handles TLS decryption [1], which works beautifully.
This looks like an actual productivity boost with AI.
That'd be like saying "I, an emergency room doctor, do not need AI assistance to interpret an EKG"
Consider that your expertise is atypical.
a) Has the knowledge to run tcpdump or similar from the command line
b) Has the ambition to document and publish their effort on the internet
c) Has the ability identify and patch the target behaviors in code
I argue that, had they not run to an LLM, they likely would have solved this problem more efficiently, and would have learned more along the way. Forgive me for being so critical, but the LLM use here simply comes off as lazy. And not lazy in a good efficiency amplifying way, but lazy in a sloppy way. Ultimately this person achieved their goal, but this is a pattern I am seeing on a daily basis at this point, and I worry that heavy LLM users will see their skill sets stagnate and likely atrophy.
Hard disagree. Asking an LLM is 1000% more efficient than reading docs, lots of which are poorly written and thus dense and time-consuming to wade through.
The same stuff happens when summarizing documentation. In that regard, I would say that, at best, modern LLMs are only good for finding an entrypoint into the docs.
Why I think I’d win the bet is I’m proficient with tcpdump and wireshark and I’m reasonably confident that running to a frontier model and dealing with any hallucinations is more efficient and faster than recalling the incantantions and parsing the output myself.
This is just expert blindness, and objectively, measurably wrong.
I'm still waiting for a systems engineering tool that can log every layer, and handle SSL the whole pipe wide.
Im covering everything from strafe and ltrace on the machine, file reads, IO profiling, bandwidth profiling. Like, the whole thing, from beginning to end.
Theres no tool that does that.
Hell, I can't even see good network traces within a single Linux app. The closest you'll find is https://github.com/mozillazg/ptcpdump
But especially with Firefox, good luck.
We have only ourselves to blame that there aren't better tools (publicly) available. If I hypothetically (really!) had such a tool, it would be an advantage over every other SRE out there that could use it. Trying to sell it directly comes with more headaches than money, selling it to corporations has different headaches, open-sourcing it don't pay the bills, nevermind the burnout (people don't donate for shit). So the way to do it is make a pitch deck, get VC funding so you're able to pay rent until it gets acquired by Oracle/RedHat/IBM (aka the greatest hits for Linux tool acquisition), or try and charge money for it when you run out of VC funding, leading to accusations of "rug pull" and development of alternatives (see also: docker) just to spite you.
In the base case you sell Hashimoto and your bank account has two (three!) commas, but worst case you don't make rent and go homeless when instead you could've gone to a FAANG and made $250k/yr instead of getting paid $50k/yr as the founder and burning VC cash and eating ramen that you have to make yourself.
I agree, that would be an awesome tool! Best case scenario, a company pays for that tool to be developed internally, the company goes under, it gets sold as an asset and whomever buys it forms a compnay and tries to sell it directly and then that company goes under but that whomever finally open sources it because they don't want it to slip into obscurity but if falls into obscurity anyway because it only works on Linux 5.x kernels and can't be ported to the 6.x series that we're on now easily.