> is SSH still a safe tool? Is there something better?
> Is there something better?
Not using the internet is better :P
Ask HN: SSH is still safe, after NSA?
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Ask HN: SSH is still safe, after NSA?
#12> is SSH still a safe tool? Is there something better?
> Is there something better? Not using the internet is better :P
Yet, here we are.
It has just occurred to me that I went from an employer for whom 'the internet' was just a medium over which biz was transacted to one for whom without 'the internet' would not exist at all.
Re: Ask HN: SSH is still safe, after NSA?
#13> is SSH still a safe tool? Is there something better?
Well ssh is a fairly complex daemon with quite a few features. For example with OpenSSH you can authenticate with a preshared key and challenge response or with PAM integration, or with a regular unix password. It also supports several types of encryption. All these things are useful but requires more code. Some people would argue that a very simple daemon with fewer features might be more secure because it has less…
> Some people would argue that a very simple daemon with fewer features might be more secure because it has less attack area.
If it's true for something like a web server, it ought to be true for SSH. Thanks for the link to spiped.
Re: Ask HN: SSH is still safe, after NSA?
#14Almost certainly, provided you're running a recent-enough version. A snooper at the line level would be able to see that you were SSH'ing to a given system and the amount of data transferred, but nothing more. SSH has had very few vulnerabilities and has been really put through the ringer crypto-wise for quite some time. The protocol itself is likely quite solid. Of its common crypto algorithms, the only one I'd avoi…
> SSH'ing to a given system and the amount of data transferred, but nothing more. A passive eavesdropper sees very precise timing of every keystroke, as well as the timing and size of the response. This is enough to reconstruct text being typed with surprisingly good accuracy.
[ignore this - see edits] i thought one problem with ssh was that it used tcp and too-large packets. hence that other thing that builds on top of it, and whose name i can't remember. having said that, i'm sure there is side channel info - i'm just not sure how precise things are.
also, what cipher suite does ssh use. does it have forward secrecy?
[edit1: to answer that last question; yes it does.]
[edit2: paper on keystroke timing attack - http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dawnsong/papers/ssh-timing.pdf - each keystroke is a packet; passwords have no echo. this is from 2001 - it has suggestions like sending packets when idle, but i don't think they've been implemented.]