Sshole (sshhole.com)

227 pointsby josemrban hour ago39 comments

nxobject 13 minutes ago

Above all, I’m a little sad that the musl developers decided to make a lot of “well it’s convenient” changes to core crypto functions — at least without the level of auditing that would have caught this! It’s tarnished their reputation in my eyes a little.

scandinavian 13 minutes ago

Did anyone get it to work? I tried on the official alpine docker image, enabled password login for root. The shadow entry has ! as password by default, this didn't work with a > 256 character password (i also did passwd -l which also does !). I manually changed it to * and it still didn't work.

Am I doing anything wrong here?

OpenSSH_10.3p1, OpenSSL 3.5.9 29 Sep 2026

PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.24"

neuroticnews25 25 minutes ago

That's a well-made site, yet I feel nothing.

cpach 23 minutes ago

LLM output fatigue?

jonstewart 13 minutes ago

What is dead can never die. All blueteamers are ironborn these days.

tasuki 8 minutes ago

Maybe that's on you though. I enjoyed it, though the discrepancy between the `*sshole` name and the `sshhole.com` domain made me twitch. How is anyone[0] obsessive enough to find this and write it up and yet not obsessive enough to make the amount of `h` consistent?

[0]: Be they human or LLM. Or an entity with any proportion of the two. I do not judge nor discriminate.

draxen 3 minutes ago

I avoided using alpine-based containers ever since finding out a lot of Linux server software is actually Linux + SystemD software. The union set API of both Linux and SystemD seems to be the default "Linux API" today.

RVuRnvbM2e 5 minutes ago

Wait so musl, famously a stickler for standards, just changed the behaviour of a POSIX function?

illusive4080 30 minutes ago

From the other thread’s source [1], it affects musl without PAM. You can set PasswordAuthentication=no or update to remediate.

[1] https://hachyderm.io/@damienmiller/117563026759098135

hypfer 30 minutes ago

What is out there that uses musl without PAM and hosts an OpenSSH SSHd with PasswordAuthentication?

As in: "Actually out there"

The hypothetical Alpine exists, yes, but what runs that like that?

jbyers 26 minutes ago

A large number of Docker containers?

Edit: Sure, a small minority presumably run sshd under these conditions. But a small minority times the number of Alpine containers still gets to a large absolute number with a trivial exploit. It's bad.

Edit 2: You really don't need to look very hard to find public container examples at million-download scale.

hypfer 25 minutes ago

Docker containers that run sshds?

ekidd 23 minutes ago

Many, many Docker containers rely on "docker exec" or the kubectl equivalent to gain CLI access when needed. To have sshd in an Alpine Docker container, you're generally need to be running init and a bunch of demons, not just a single standalone service.

I'm guessing in practice relatively few people are actually exposed. But if they are, it's catastrophic.

stingraycharles 21 minutes ago

Docker containers run sshd?

Bender 20 minutes ago

Possibly public SFTP servers. I've allowed null passwords in the past for anonymous public SFTP and I run Alpine Linux exclusively for my servers both VM's and physical. The shadow package (PAM) did not get installed by default. I installed it but I had to specify it in the installation.

I will activate one for people to play around with:

    sftp [email protected]

figassis 4 minutes ago

Agent sandboxes today probably

pluc 35 minutes ago

A+ name

hypfer 28 minutes ago

A* name

kleiba2 17 minutes ago

A{256,} name

henry700 10 minutes ago

cube00 25 minutes ago

> except a lot of programs never check for NULL. they just compare whatever crypt() gives back with the stored field, hit the NULL, and crash

> so musl (the libc under alpine) goes ok fine, crypt() just won't return NULL anymore. if it fails, it returns a single character instead.

Considering it's been accepted that crashing if malloc returns a NULL is your fault, did musl really feel the need to accommodate bad implementations like this or is this just AI dribble?

bombcar 35 minutes ago

The real name of this is sshole - the is the "star" of the show, after all.

yreg 31 minutes ago

*sshole, the * is the star of the show

You can use \ to escape formatting.

gosen 27 minutes ago

I really like creativity in the name, the way website built and the content

"tl;dr" was a bit of a downgrade though, but that's fine

it's a nice way to promote the company behind it

jdw64 23 minutes ago

I liked that this site explained the vulnerability in an easy-to-understand way.

lclc 14 minutes ago

One more reason to build your (own) Docker images on 'FROM scratch' (basically nothing).

blueflow 11 minutes ago

No, the Alpine containers don't come with sshd preinstalled. You'd have to manually install via dockerfile and leave it unconfigured.

ChrisRR 14 minutes ago

Can we just have a site with the text and images without the awkward scrolling crap? Hijacking basic features is an instant click away from sites for me

Edit: It seems to work fine on mobile. I'm not sure why the scrolling behaviour was added on the desktop version of the site

henry700 10 minutes ago

at this point my only reaction is "are you fucking kidding me"

rvz 39 minutes ago

Related discussion: [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377221

sneela 21 minutes ago

Yet another clankered finding creating a clankered website with clankered explanations. To be fair, this one's a lot better than the other clankered equivalents, but I wonder whether these people even know enough about their bug to have their own write-up?

Also, what's with this damn trend of typing in lowercase only? Why is this a thing?

> oh did i say "i"? sorry. i had agent swarms. a lot of them. let's not get into it

Still a cool finding... it's just the communication is becoming a lot worse these days - I want to understand the findings please, not be impressed by your webpage! Biggest gripe in recent memory is https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/skitter-creek-bath-salts

BugsJustFindMe 5 minutes ago

> Also, what's with this damn trend of typing in lowercase only?

Anticapitalism.