> I literally can't make heads or tails of the risk here. All I see is the very alarming and scary words "backdoor" and "ssh server" in the same sentence.
From what I've read, there is still lots of unknowns about the scope of the problem. What has been uncovered so far indicates it involves bypassing authentication in SSH.
> If this payload is loaded in openssh sshd, the RSA_public_decrypt function will be redirected into a malicious implementation. We have observed that this malicious implementation can be used to bypass authentication. Further research is being done to explain why.
Thus, an attacker maybe could use this to connect to vulnerable servers without needing to authenticate at all.
From what I've read, there is still lots of unknowns about the scope of the problem. What has been uncovered so far indicates it involves bypassing authentication in SSH.
In https://gist.github.com/thesamesam/223949d5a074ebc3dce9ee78b..., Sam James points out
> If this payload is loaded in openssh sshd, the RSA_public_decrypt function will be redirected into a malicious implementation. We have observed that this malicious implementation can be used to bypass authentication. Further research is being done to explain why.
Thus, an attacker maybe could use this to connect to vulnerable servers without needing to authenticate at all.