Re: [Curdle] Time for SSH3?

[Ilari Liusvaara <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2023 at 10:36:26AM +0000, John Mattsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I strongly think the right future for SSH is to not do more patching
> and instead move to SSH3 build on top of QUIC. One such proposal was
> recently published on arXiv.
> 
> https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.08396.pdf

That is not built on top of QUIC, it is built on top of HTTP/3.

And I find what proposal does with authentication scary:

- Use of JWTs for key authentication (really core mode).
- Offhand remarks about using OpenID Connect without any consideration
  on possible hidden landmines.
- Not supporting SSH certificates, there are fair amount of places that
  do use those (and no, those are not X.509).
- And I think some are using GSS-API too... Is that all just Kerberos,
  or is there also something else? Might be too painful to support tho.
- Using WebPKI certificates for server authentication.
- (there might be more, I only skimmed the paper.)


Then a major pain point with SSH2 is lack of capability to route
connections, forcing bad hacks with custom ports and port forwarding or
else wasting (valuable v4) IP addresses. QUIC does not solve this
problem, because it is hostile to intermediates, even ones that just
route encrypted connections (at least without severe restrictions on
what features of QUIC are allowed).




-Ilari