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openssh: timing attack leads to information disclosure

Package(s):openssh CVE #(s):CAN-2003-0190
Created:May 2, 2003 Updated:November 30, 2004
Description: From the advisory: "During a pen-test we stumbled across a nasty bug in OpenSSH-portable with PAM support enabled (via the --with-pam configure script switch). This bug allows a remote attacker to identify valid users on vulnerable systems, through a simple timing attack. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and may have high severity, if combined with poor password policies and other security problems that allow local privilege escalation."
Alerts:
Ubuntu USN-34-1 openssh 2004-11-30
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2003.035 openssh 2003-08-06
Red Hat RHSA-2003:222-01 openssh 2003-07-29
Gentoo 200305-02 shadow 2003-05-13
Gentoo 200305-01 openssh 2002-03-05

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openssh: timing attack leads to information disclosure

Posted Dec 2, 2004 10:28 UTC (Thu) by addw (guest, #1771) [Link]

This sort of attack has been talked about before, surely it would be easy to fix by putting something like this at program start:

start = time(0);

and then in the appropriate places:

now = time(0);
sleep((start < now) ? 0 : 1) + rand() % 4);


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