Description
Limit the ciphers to strong algorithms.
Counter (CTR) mode is also preferred over cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode.
The following line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
demonstrates use of those ciphers:
Ciphers chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr
The man page sshd_config(5) contains a list of supported ciphers.
Rationale
Based on research conducted at various institutions, it was determined that the symmetric
portion of the SSH Transport Protocol (as described in RFC 4253) has security weaknesses
that allowed recovery of up to 32 bits of plaintext from a block of ciphertext that was
encrypted with the Cipher Block Chaining (CBD) method. From that research, new Counter
mode algorithms (as described in RFC4344) were designed that are not vulnerable to these
types of attacks and these algorithms are now recommended for standard use.
Shell script
The following script can be run on the host to remediate the issue.
#!/bin/bash
# Remediation is applicable only in certain platforms
if [ ! -f /.dockerenv ] && [ ! -f /run/.containerenv ]; then
if [ -e "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" ] ; then
LC_ALL=C sed -i "/^\s*Ciphers\s\+/Id" "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"
else
touch "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"
fi
# make sure file has newline at the end
sed -i -e '$a\' "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"
cp "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.bak"
# Insert at the beginning of the file
printf '%s\n' "Ciphers aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com" > "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"
cat "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.bak" >> "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"
# Clean up after ourselves.
rm "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.bak"
else
>&2 echo 'Remediation is not applicable, nothing was done'
fi
