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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

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Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#71

Post by hamdingers »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #5
snowmobile wrote: post #2

> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier! Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"

smoking gun, you're absolutely right, good question, em dash, "it isn't just foo, it's also bar", real honest truth, brutal truth, underscores the issue, delves into, more em dashes, . It's nauseating.

You might find this a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#72

Post by layer8 »

snowmobile wrote: post #2

> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier! Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"

Yes, it’s kind of a corpus delicti. ;)

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#73

Post by jcims »

snowmobile wrote: post #2

> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier! Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"

I'm working on a little SRE agent to pre-load tickets with information to help our on-call and I'm already tired of Claude finding 'smoking guns'.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#74

Post by jacquesm »

eikenberry wrote: post #41
swiftcoder wrote: post #11

> Obviously forking go’s crypto library is a little scary, and I’m gonna have to do some thinking about how to maintain my little patch in a safe way This should really be upstreamed as an option on the ssh library. Its good to default to sending chaff in untrusted environments, but there are plenty of places where we might as well save the bandwidth

+1... Given how much SSH is used for computer-to-computer communication it seems like there really should be a way to disable this when it isn't necessary.

In practice I've never felt this was an issue. But I can see how with extremely low bandwidth devices it might be, for instance LoRa over a 40 km link into some embedded device.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#75

Post by jcynix »

Terretta wrote: post #42
jcynix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what they read on The Internets when training, so don't expect them to generate new phrases, other than what they learned from it?

### The answer that fits everything (and what to do about it)

Maybe we need a real AI which creates new phrases and teaches the poor LLMs?

Looking back we already had similar problems, when we had to ask our colleagues, students, whomever "Did you get your proposed solution from the answers part or the questions part of a stackoverflow article?" :-0

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#76

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

simplicio wrote: post #63
dathinab wrote: post #10

> Keystroke obfuscation can be disabled client-side. please never do that (in production) if anyone half way serious tries they _will_ be able to break you encryption end find what you typed this isn't a hypothetical niche case obfuscation mechanism, it's a people broke SSH then a fix was found case. I don't even know why you can disable it tbh.

The fix seems kind of crazy though, adding so much traffic overhead to every ssh session. I assume there's a reason they didn't go that route, but on a first pass seems weird they didn't just buffer password strokes to be sent in one packet, or just add some artificial timing jitter to each keystroke.

SSH has no way of knowing when a password is being typed. It can happen any time within the session after SSH auth.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#77

Post by BoppreH »

swiftcoder wrote: post #11

> Obviously forking go’s crypto library is a little scary, and I’m gonna have to do some thinking about how to maintain my little patch in a safe way This should really be upstreamed as an option on the ssh library. Its good to default to sending chaff in untrusted environments, but there are plenty of places where we might as well save the bandwidth

Yes, but I wouldn't be surprised if the change is rejected. The crypto library is very opinionated, you're also not allowed to configure the order of TLS cipher suites, for example.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#78

Post by HPsquared »

snowmobile wrote: post #2

> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier! Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"

They love clichés, and hate repeating the same words for something (repetition penalty) so they'll say something like "cause" then it's a "smoking gun" then it's something else

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#79

Post by benlivengood »

shadowgovt wrote: post #28
dathinab wrote: post #10

> Keystroke obfuscation can be disabled client-side. please never do that (in production) if anyone half way serious tries they _will_ be able to break you encryption end find what you typed this isn't a hypothetical niche case obfuscation mechanism, it's a people broke SSH then a fix was found case. I don't even know why you can disable it tbh.

But they'd have to be on the same network as me to do that attack, right?

Yep, like ECHELON and friends are. The metadata recorded about your (all of our) traffic is probably enough to perform the timing attack.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#80

Post by layer8 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #37

I find it disturbing. One thing you notice if you have ADSL is that some services are built as if slower connections matter and others are not. Like Google's voice and audio chat services work poorly but most of the others work well. Uploading images to Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Nextdoor is reliable, but for Tumblr you have to try it twice. I don't what they are doing wrong but they are doi…

> One thing you notice if you have ADSL

This is funny to me, because ADSL used to be the fast thing, as opposed to dialup modems.

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