are you affected?
- is your sshd running on musl? (alpine, openwrt, buildroot, yocto)
- is it not using pam? alpine’s openssh-server doesn’t by default, or maybe you set UsePAM no
- are password logins still on? they are by default
- is there an account with just * as its password? key-only users, ldap users, root on alpine
- and some other account with a real password?
- then that * account takes any password between 257 and 1024 characters
on alpine’s official aws and azure images that’s the default alpine user, and it has passwordless doas. so it’s root
on debian, ubuntu, fedora or anything else with glibc? going through pam? dropbear? openbsd? you’re fine
I’m no cybersecurity expert, but from what I’ve heard from those who are, this is the new normal as anyone who formerly had no chance due to being a “script kiddie” can now just prompt an AI* to eventually find a vulnerability.
* oversimplification redacted
You’d think that but so far I haven’t seen an actual PoC exploit for the PHP vulnerability that doesn’t require misconfiguring the server. And this is over a week after the patches were released.
The way it works is that finding vulnerabilities required a lot of technical understanding and mental effort. A software could have a glaring hole in it for years without anyone finding out simply due to nobody really looking. AI just gives you the ability to do rudimentary exploit analysis around the clock without having to spend your own time. This is a wake up call to anyone making software in sloppy fashion.
But it isn’t quite as easy as saying “AI hack into this service”, if the person doing the hacking is using the same model as the person who made the service, and that person already asked the AI to do that and fixed the resulting exploit prior to release.
Even projects that use AI in a limited fashion to code or even not at all, often use AI to at least do some red team stuff prior to release.
I don’t really foresee any way this doesn’t even out eventually.