Notified: May 10, 2002 Updated: May 14, 2002
Status
Not Affected
Vendor Statement
Initial verification on a Solaris 8 server with OpenSSH 31p1
indicates that the "AllowedAuthentications" keyword is not used in
the OpenSSH server configuration. However, OpenSSH uses the following
two keywords for authentication configuration: "PubkeyAuthentication"
"PasswordAuthentication" The default value for both keywords is yes, which means the server
will allow both password and public key authentication. This is not
a vulnerability. But since all keywords including
"PasswordAuthentication" in the default OpenSSH sshd_config file are
commented out, users who want public key authentication method only
may mistakenly just uncomment "PubkeyAuthentication" keyword and
assign a yes value to it, not knowing that password authentication is
on by default even though that keyword is commented out in the
configuration file. Workaround fix: For OpenSSH, if public key authentication is the only
method allowed, change the default value from "yes" to "no" for the
"PasswordAuthentication" keyword in sshd_config file.
Vendor Information
The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.
Addendum
The CERT/CC has no additional comments at this time.