Threat database

A vulnerability was detected in PuTTY 0.83. Affected is the function eddsa_verify of the file crypto/ecc-ssh.c of the component Ed25519 Signature Handler. The manipulation results in improper verification of cryptographic signature. The attack may be performed from remote. The attack requires a high level of complexity. The exploitability is told to be difficult. The exploit is now public and may be used. The real existence of this vulnerability is still doubted at the moment. The patch is identified as af996b5ec27ab79bae3882071b9d6acf16044549. It is advisable to implement a patch to correct this issue. The vendor was contacted early, responded in a very professional manner and quickly released a patch for the affected product. However, at the moment there is no proof that this flaw might have any real-world impact.

In PuTTY 0.68 through 0.80 before 0.81, biased ECDSA nonce generation allows an attacker to recover a user's NIST P-521 secret key via a quick attack in approximately 60 signatures. This is especially important in a scenario where an adversary is able to read messages signed by PuTTY or Pageant. The required set of signed messages may be publicly readable because they are stored in a public Git service that supports use of SSH for commit signing, and the signatures were made by Pageant through an agent-forwarding mechanism. In other words, an adversary may already have enough signature information to compromise a victim's private key, even if there is no further use of vulnerable PuTTY versions. After a key compromise, an adversary may be able to conduct supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. A second, independent scenario is that the adversary is an operator of an SSH server to which the victim authenticates (for remote login or file copy), even though this server is not fully trusted by the victim, and the victim uses the same private key for SSH connections to other services operated by other entities. Here, the rogue server operator (who would otherwise have no way to determine the victim's private key) can derive the victim's private key, and then use it for unauthorized access to those other services. If the other services include Git services, then again it may be possible to conduct supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. This also affects, for example, FileZilla before 3.67.0, WinSCP before 6.3.3, TortoiseGit before 2.15.0.1, and TortoiseSVN through 1.14.6.