Understanding OpenSSH's future deprecation of the 'ssh-rsa' signature scheme

May 3, 2021

OpenSSH 8.6 was recently released, and its release notes have a 'future deprecation notice' as has every release since OpenSSH 8.2:

Future deprecation notice

It is now possible to perform chosen-prefix attacks against the SHA-1 algorithm for less than USD$50K.

In the SSH protocol, the "ssh-rsa" signature scheme uses the SHA-1 hash algorithm in conjunction with the RSA public key algorithm. OpenSSH will disable this signature scheme by default in the near future.

More or less a year ago I flailed around about what this meant. Now I think that I understand more about what is going on, enough so to talk about what is really affected and why. Helping this out is that since the OpenSSH 8.5 release notes, OpenSSH has had the current, more explicit wording above about the situation.

When we use public key cryptography to sign or encrypt something, we generally don't directly sign or encrypt the object itself. As covered in Soatok's Please Stop Encrypting with RSA Directly, for encryption we normally use public key encryption on a symmetric key that the message itself is encrypted with. For signing, we normally hash the message and then sign the hash (see, for instance, where cryptographic hashes come into TLS certificates). OpenSSH is no exception to this; it has both key types and key signature schemes (or algorithms), the latter of which specify the hash type to be used.

(OpenSSH's underlying key types are documented best in the ssh-keygen's manpage for the -t option. The -sk keytypes are FIDO/U2F keys, as mentioned in the OpenSSH 8.2 release notes. The supported key signature algorithms can be seen with 'ssh -Q key-sig'.)

What OpenSSH is working to deprecate is the (sole) key signature algorithm that hashes messages to be signed with SHA-1, on the grounds that SHA-1 hashing is looking increasingly weak. For historical reasons, this key signature algorithm has the same name ('ssh-rsa') as a key type, which creates exciting grounds for misunderstandings, such as I had last year. Even after this deprecation, OpenSSH RSA keys will be usable as user and host keys, because OpenSSH has provided other key signature algorithms using RSA keys and stronger hashes (specifically SHA2-256 and SHA2-512, which are also known as just 'SHA-256' and 'SHA-512', see Wikipedia on SHA-2).

Most relatively modern systems support RSA-based key signature schemes other than just ssh-rsa. Older systems may not, especially if they're small or embedded systems using more minimal SSH implementations. Even if things like routers from big companies support key signature schemes beyond ssh-rsa, you may have to update their firmware, which is something that not everyone does and which may require support contracts and the like. Unfortunately, anything you want to connect to has to have a key signature scheme that you support, because otherwise you can't authenticate their host key.

(OpenSSH Ed25519 keys also have a single key signature scheme associated with them, if you ignore SSH certificates; they are both 'ssh-ed25519'. Hopefully we will never run into a similar hash weakness issue with them. Since I just looked it up in RFC 8709 and RFC 8032, ed25519 signatures use SHA2-512.)

Written on 03 May 2021.
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Last modified: Mon May 3 00:42:20 2021
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