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Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 19:44:35 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: OpenSSH key blacklisting

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 04:46:30PM +0200, Robert Buchholz wrote:
> Do you have a patch to propose, implementing your idea?

Dmitry V. Levin and I have completed design of the encoding scheme, and
Dmitry implemented it.  Now we have:

blacklist-encode.c - the encoder program;
blacklist-check.c - the "checker" program, used for testing only;
openssh-3.6.1p2-owl-blacklist.diff - the patch to sshd.

The patch is against an older version that we still have in Owl (with
lots of other patches), but it is trivial to forward-port.  In fact, I
expect that Dmitry will port it to the newer version in ALT Linux's
distributions very soon (if not already).  Dmitry - please announce your
forward-port in here when you have it.

Dmitry has done fairly extensive testing, but we would not mind others
in the community doing more tests and reporting back in here.

We also have openssh-blacklist-0.3-1.bin.bz2, which is used as a
"source" in our OpenSSH package.  It was generated from
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openssh-blacklist/openssh-blacklist_0.3.tar.gz
with:

	cat [DR]SA-{1024,2048}.[bl]e{32,64} | ./blacklist-encode 6 > openssh-blacklist-0.3-1.bin
	bzip2 !$

That is, it contains 48-bit partial fingerprints for 1024-bit and
2048-bit RSA and 1024-bit DSA keys for PID range 1 to 32767 (a total of
almost 300k keys).  The installed file size is just 1.3 MB, which
corresponds to less than 4.5 bytes per fingerprint, and the .bz2 (and
.rpm) is just 1.2 MB.  Lookups are very quick, and only three small
portions of the file are read per lookup, for a total of under 100
bytes of data to read (as far as sshd is concerned).

Neither the code nor the file format is specific to 48-bit partial
fingerprints; it is possible to use larger ones by supplying something
other than "6" (the size in bytes) on blacklist-encode's command-line.
There is a safety check against even smaller values in
blacklist-encode.c's main(), although if you really know what you're
doing, you can go for 40-bit as well, bringing file size for the same
keys to under 1 MB.

Our latest source code may be found here:

	http://cvsweb.openwall.com/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/Owl/packages/openssh/

(along with lots of other patches to OpenSSH).

The pre-encoded blacklist file may be found here:

	ftp://ftp.ru.openwall.com/pub/Owl/pool/sources/openssh/

(and on other mirrors).

I've attached current revisions of the source files and patch mentioned
above.  This is to encourage community review and comments, and to
enable easy quoting of relevant context (please do not overquote).

Please note that this effort was/is supported by CivicActions.  It will
enable us to receive funding for and get involved in more community
activities in the future if you give due credit to both Openwall and
CivicActions (especially with website links) when you reuse this stuff.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Alexander

View attachment "blacklist-encode.c" of type "text/plain" (6532 bytes)

View attachment "blacklist-check.c" of type "text/plain" (5902 bytes)

View attachment "openssh-3.6.1p2-owl-blacklist.diff" of type "text/plain" (18092 bytes)

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