path: root/debian/README.Debian

OpenSSH for Debian
------------------

UPGRADE ISSUES
==============

PermitRootLogin
---------------

As of 1:6.6p1-1, new installations will be set to "PermitRootLogin
without-password" (or the synonymous "PermitRootLogin prohibit-password" as
of 1:7.1p1-1).  This disables password authentication for root, foiling
password dictionary attacks on the root user.  Some sites may wish to use
the stronger "PermitRootLogin forced-commands-only" or "PermitRootLogin no",
but note that "PermitRootLogin no" will break setups that SSH to root with a
forced command to take full-system backups.  You can use PermitRootLogin in
a Match block if you want finer-grained control here.

For many years Debian's OpenSSH packaging used "PermitRootLogin yes", in
line with upstream.  To avoid breaking local setups, this is still true for
installations upgraded from before 1:6.6p1-1.  If you wish to change this,
you should edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, change it manually, and run "service
ssh restart" as root.

Disabling PermitRootLogin means that an attacker possessing credentials for
the root account (any credentials in the case of "yes", or private key
material in the case of "prohibit-password") must compromise a normal user
account rather than being able to SSH directly to root.  Be careful to avoid
a false illusion of security if you change this setting; any account you
escalate to root from should be considered equivalent to root for the
purposes of security against external attack.  You might for example disable
it if you know you will only ever log in as root from the physical console.

Since the root account does not generally have non-password credentials
unless you explicitly install an SSH public key in its
~/.ssh/authorized_keys, which you presumably only do if you want to SSH to
it, "prohibit-password" should be a reasonable default for most sites.

As of OpenSSH 7.0, this is the upstream default.

For further discussion, see:

  https://bugs.debian.org/298138
  https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2164

X11 Forwarding
--------------

ssh's default for ForwardX11 has been changed to ``no'' because it has
been pointed out that logging into remote systems administered by
untrusted people is likely to open you up to X11 attacks, so you
should have to actively decide that you trust the remote machine's
root, before enabling X11.  I strongly recommend that you do this on a
machine-by-machine basis, rather than just enabling it in the default
host settings.

In order for X11 forwarding to work, you need to install xauth on the
server. In Debian this is in the xbase-clients package.

As of OpenSSH 3.1, the remote $DISPLAY uses localhost by default to reduce
the security risks of X11 forwarding. Look up X11UseLocalhost in
sshd_config(8) if this is a problem.

OpenSSH 3.8 invented ForwardX11Trusted, which when set to no causes the
ssh client to create an untrusted X cookie so that attacks on the
forwarded X11 connection can't become attacks on X clients on the remote
machine. However, this has some problems in implementation - notably a
very short timeout of the untrusted cookie - breaks large numbers of
existing setups, and generally seems immature. The Debian package
therefore sets the default for this option to "yes" (in ssh itself,
rather than in ssh_config).

Fallback to RSH
---------------

The default for this setting has been changed from Yes to No, for
security reasons, and to stop the delay attempting to rsh to machines
that don't offer the service.  Simply switch it back on in either
/etc/ssh/ssh_config or ~/.ssh/config for those machines that you need
it for.

Setgid ssh-agent and environment variables
------------------------------------------

As of version 1:3.5p1-1, ssh-agent is installed setgid to prevent ptrace()
attacks retrieving private key material. This has the side-effect of causing
glibc to remove certain environment variables which might have security
implications for set-id programs, including LD_PRELOAD, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and
TMPDIR.

If you need to set any of these environment variables, you will need to do
so in the program exec()ed by ssh-agent. This may involve creating a small
wrapper script.

Symlink Hostname invocation
---------------------------

This version of ssh no longer includes support for invoking ssh with the
hostname as the name of the file run.  People wanting this support should
use the ssh-argv0 script.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

OTHER ISSUES
============

Authorization Forwarding
------------------------

Similarly, root on a remote server could make use of your ssh-agent
(while you're logged into their machine) to obtain access to machines
which trust your keys.  This feature is therefore disabled by default.
You should only re-enable it for those hosts (in your ~/.ssh/config or
/etc/ssh/ssh_config) where you are confident that the remote machine
is not a threat.

Problems logging in with RSA authentication
-------------------------------------------

If you have trouble logging in with RSA authentication then the
problem is probably caused by the fact that you have your home
directory writable by group, as well as user (this is the default on
Debian systems).

Depending upon other settings on your system (i.e. other users being
in your group) this could open a security hole, so you will need to
make your home directory writable only by yourself.  Run this command,
as yourself:

  chmod g-w ~/

to remove group write permissions.  If you use ssh-copy-id to install your
keys, it does this for you.

-L option of ssh nonfree
------------------------

non-free ssh supported the usage of the option -L to use a non privileged
port for scp. This option will not be supported by scp from openssh.

Please use instead scp -o "UsePrivilegedPort=no" as documented in the
manpage to scp itself.

Problem logging in because of TCP-Wrappers
------------------------------------------

ssh is compiled with support for tcp-wrappers. So if you can no longer
log into your system, please check that /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny
are configured so that ssh is not blocked.

Kerberos support
----------------

ssh is now compiled with Kerberos support. Unfortunately, privilege
separation is incompatible with parts of Kerberos support for protocol 2;
you may need to run kinit after logging in.

Interoperability between scp and the ssh.com SSH server
-------------------------------------------------------

In version 2 and greater of the commercial SSH server produced by SSH
Communications Security, scp was changed to use SFTP (SSH2's file transfer
protocol) instead of the traditional rcp-over-ssh, thereby breaking
compatibility. The OpenSSH developers regard this as a bug in the ssh.com
server, and do not currently intend to change OpenSSH's scp to match.

Workarounds for this problem are to install scp1 on the server (scp2 will
fall back to it), to use sftp, or to use some other transfer mechanism such
as rsync-over-ssh or tar-over-ssh.

Running sshd from inittab
-------------------------

Some people find it useful to run the sshd server from inittab, to make sure
that it always stays running. To do this, stop sshd ('/etc/init.d/ssh
stop'), add the following line to /etc/inittab, and run 'telinit q':

  ss:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/sshd -D

If you do this, note that you will need to stop sshd being started in the
normal way ('update-rc.d ssh disable') and that you will need to restart
this sshd manually on upgrades.

Per-connection sshd instances with systemd
------------------------------------------

If you want to reconfigure systemd to listen on port 22 itself and launch an
instance of sshd for each connection (inetd-style socket activation), then
you can run:

  systemctl stop ssh.service
  systemctl start ssh.socket

To make this permanent:

  systemctl disable ssh.service
  systemctl enable ssh.socket

This may be appropriate in environments where minimal footprint is critical
(e.g. cloud guests).  Be aware that this bypasses MaxStartups, and systemd's
MaxConnections cannot quite replace this as it cannot distinguish between
authenticated and unauthenticated connections; see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=963268 for more discussion.

The provided ssh.socket unit file sets ListenStream=22.  If you need to have
it listen on a different address or port, then you will need to do this by
copying /lib/systemd/system/ssh.socket to /etc/systemd/system/ssh.socket and
modifying the ListenStream option.  See systemd.socket(5) for details.

Terminating SSH sessions cleanly on shutdown/reboot with systemd
----------------------------------------------------------------

If you have libpam-systemd >= 230 installed (following openssh-server's
Recommends) and "UsePAM yes" in sshd_config (the default configuration
shipped by this package), then SSH sessions will be terminated cleanly when
the server is shut down or rebooted.

If either of these conditions does not hold, then you may find that SSH
sessions hang silently when the server is shut down or rebooted.  If you do
not want to use PAM or configure it properly for whatever reason, then you
can instead copy
/usr/share/doc/openssh-server/examples/ssh-session-cleanup.service to
/etc/systemd/system/ and run "systemctl enable ssh-session-cleanup.service".

Non-systemd users may find /usr/lib/openssh/ssh-session-cleanup helpful if
they have a similar problem, although at present there is no system
integration for this for anything other than systemd.

SSH protocol 1 server support removed
-------------------------------------

sshd(8) no longer supports the old SSH protocol 1, so all the configuration
options related to it are now deprecated and should be removed from
/etc/ssh/sshd_config.  These are:

  KeyRegenerationInterval
  RSAAuthentication
  RhostsRSAAuthentication
  ServerKeyBits

The Protocol option is also no longer needed, although it is silently
ignored rather than deprecated.

-- 
Matthew Vernon <matthew@debian.org>
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>