The maintainers of OpenSSH have released OpenSSH 9.2 to address a number of security bugs, including a memory safety vulnerability in the OpenSSH server (sshd).
Tracked as CVE-2023-25136, the shortcoming has been classified as a pre-authentication double free vulnerability that was introduced in version 9.1.
“This is not believed to be exploitable, and it occurs in the unprivileged pre-auth process that is subject to chroot(2) and is further sandboxed on most major platforms,” OpenSSH disclosed in its release notes on February 2, 2023.
Credited with reporting the flaw to OpenSSH in July 2022 is security researcher Mantas Mikulenas.
OpenSSH is the open source implementation of the secure shell (SSH) protocol that offers a suite of services for encrypted communications over an unsecured network in a client-server architecture.
“The exposure occurs in the chunk of memory freed twice, the ‘options.kex_algorithms,'” Qualys researcher Saeed Abbasi said, adding the issue results in a “double free in the unprivileged sshd process.”
Double free flaws arise when a vulnerable piece of code calls the free() function – which is used to deallocate memory blocks – twice, leading to memory corruption, which, in turn, could lead to a crash or execution of arbitrary code.
“Doubly freeing memory may result in a write-what-where condition, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code,” MITRE notes in its description of the flaw.
“While the double-free vulnerability in OpenSSH version 9.1 may raise concerns, it is essential to note that exploiting this issue is no simple task,” Abbasi explained.
“This is due to the protective measures put in place by modern memory allocators and the robust privilege separation and sandboxing implemented in the impacted sshd process.”
Users are recommended to update to OpenSSH 9.2 to mitigate potential security threats.