The work of improving ssh security by segregating functionality into separate binaries contiues, this time by introducing sshd-auth as a separate binary.

The commit message summarizes why this makes sense,

Splitting this code into a separate binary ensures that the crucial
pre-authentication attack surface has an entirely disjoint address
space from the code used for the rest of the connection. It also
yields a small runtime memory saving as the authentication code will
be unloaded after thhe authentication phase completes.

The code is in snapshots as we type.

Read the whole thing after the fold -

Omar Polo (op@) has announced the release of version 7.6.0p0 of OpenSMTPD.

The changes (including the table protocol change on which we reported earlier) are:

 - Introduced a new K_AUTH service to allow offloading the credentials
   to a proc table for non-crypt(3) authentication.  Helps with use
   cases like LDAP or custom auth.

 - Implement report responses for proc-filters too.

 - Changed the table protocol to a simpler text-based one.  Existing
   proc tables needs to be updated since old ones won't work.  The new
   protocol is documented in smtpd-tables(7).

 - Fixed the parsing of IPv6 addresses in file-backed table(5)

 - Document expected MDA behavior and the environment set by OpenSMTPD.

 - Set ORIGINAL_RECIPIENT in the environment of MDA scripts for
   compatibility with postfix.

 - Updated the bundled libtls.

See the release announcement for full details.

The OpenBSD project has announced OpenBSD 7.6, its 57^th release.

The new release contains a number of significant improvements, including but not limited to:

• There is initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite [arm64] laptops.
• Initial support for Suspend-to-Idle has been added on amd64 and i386, enabling suspend on machines which do not support S3.
• UDP parallel input has been enabled. [See earlier report]
• Libva's VA-API (Video Acceleration API) was imported into xenocara. [See earlier report]
• The default write format for tar(1) has changed to "pax". [See earlier report]
• pfctl(8) and systat(1) now display fragment reassembly statistics. [See earlier report]
• A configurable passphrase timeout for disk decryption at boot (a potential battery lifesaver) has been added. [See earlier report]
• Local-to-anchor tables are now available in pf(4) rules. [See earlier report]
• rport(4), a driver providing point-to-point interfaces for layer 3 connectivity between rdomain(4) instances, has been added.
• dhcp6leased(8), a DHCPv6 client daemon for IPv6 PD has been added. [See earlier report]
• dhclient(8) has been removed (now that dhcpleased(8) is well established). [See earlier report]
• OpenSSH 9.9, featuring:
  • sshd(8) has been split into multiple binaries. [See earlier report]
  • Options to penalize undesirable behavior [See earlier report]
  • support for a new hybrid post-quantum key exchange [See earlier report]

and of course there is the full changelog which details the changes made over this latest six month development cycle.

Installation Guide details how to get the system up and running with a fresh install, while those who already run earlier releases should follow the Upgrade Guide, in most cases using sysupgrade(8) to upgrade their systems.

Now please dive in and enjoy the new release, and while the installer runs, please do donate to the project to support further development and more future goodies for us all!

There has been a significant change to the behaviour of sysupgrade(8):

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	florian@cvs.openbsd.org	2024/09/24 01:33:35

Modified files:
	usr.sbin/sysupgrade: sysupgrade.8 sysupgrade.sh 

Log message:
Remove -r toggle and generally be less smart.

The default is to install the next release. Snapshots are only
installed when invoked with -s.

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) updated the version of OpenBSD -current to "7.6-current".

Those running the latest-and-greatest [via a sufficiently new snapshot or built from source] no longer need to use "-D snap" with pkg_add(1) (and pkg_info(1)).

Our favorite operating system is now changing the default shell (ksh) to enforce not allowing invalid NUL characters in input that will be parsed as parts of the script.

The commit message reads,

List:       openbsd-cvs
Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
From:       Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2024-09-23 21:18:33

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org	2024/09/23 15:18:33

Modified files:
	bin/ksh        : shf.c 

Log message:
If during parsing lines in the script, ksh finds a NUL byte on the
line, it should abort ("syntax error: NUL byte unexpected").  There
appears to be one piece of software which is misinterpreting guidance
of this, and trying to depend upon embedded NUL.  During research,
every shell we tested has one or more cases where a NUL byte in the
input or inside variable contents will create divergent behaviour from
other shells.  (ie. gets converted to a space, is silently skipped, or
aborts script parsing or later execution).  All the shells are written
in C, and majority of them use C strings for everything, which means
they cannot embed a NUL, so this is not surprising.  It is quite
unbelievable there are people trying to rewrite history on a lark, and
expecting the world to follow alone.

EuroBSDCon 2024 [in Dublin, Ireland] has now ended, and slides for many of the OpenBSD developer presentations are now available in the usual place.

Video of the individual presentations can be expected somewhat later. In the meantime, OpenBSD-related presentations [including those from non-developers] can be found in the recordings of the "Foyer B" streams.

In addition, there was a full day PF tutorial with some updates to the publicly available slides.

Sebastian Benoit (benno@) announced the release of version 9.3 of rpki-client, the essential component for routing security.

See the full announcement for further details.

Key excerpts from the release announcement:

In a fediverse post, Damien Miller (djm@) announced the availability of the new OpenSSH version 9.9:

OpenSSH 9.9 has just been released. New features include support for hybrid ML-KEM X25519 post-quantum key exchange (using a formally-verified ML-KEM implementation), improved controls to drop and penalise unwanted connections, faster NTRUPrime key exchange code and more.