OpenSSH 7.0 Secure Shell Arrives
Users should upgrade to the new version as soon as possible
The OpenSSH project has announced OpenSSH 7.0, a major new release that addresses several security issues associated with previous versions. According to the announcement by OpenSSH developer Damien Miller, the focus of the new release is “to deprecate weak, legacy, and/or unsafe cryptography.”
Some of the problems fixed with the new release include:
- OpenSSH 6.8 and 6.9 incorrectly made TTYs world-writable.
- The Portable SSH variant had a privilege escalation issue related to PAM support.
- Previous editions allow an attacker to circumvent MaxAuthTries using keyboard-interactive authentication.
New features available with this release include improvements to public key types and ciphers, as well as a new prohibit-password setting. OpenSSH 7.0 also comes with several bug fixes for better security and improved usability. OpenSSH is maintained by the OpenBSD project. Watch your distro's app repository for soon-to-arrive OpenSSH 7.0 binary packages.