Bugs Page (Advanced Site Settings dialog)

An ignore message (SSH_MSG_IGNORE) is a message in the SSH protocol which can be sent from the client to the server, or from the server to the client, at any time. Either side is required to ignore the message whenever it receives it. WinSCP uses ignore messages in SSH-2 to confuse the encrypted data stream and make it harder to cryptanalyze. It also uses ignore messages for connection keepalives.

If it believes the server to have this bug, WinSCP will stop using ignore messages. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session will succeed, but keepalives will not work and the session might be less cryptographically secure than it could be.

WinSCP sometimes sends a special request to SSH servers in the middle of channel data, with the name winadj@putty.projects.tartarus.org. The purpose of this request is to measure the round-trip time to the server, which WinSCP uses to tune its flow control. The server does not actually have to understand the message; it is expected to send back a SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_FAILURE message indicating that it didn’t understand it. (All WinSCP needs for its timing calculations is some kind of response.)

It has been known for some SSH servers to get confused by this message in one way or another – because it has a long name, or because they can’t cope with unrecognized request names even to the extent of sending back the correct failure response, or because they handle it sensibly but fill up the server’s log file with pointless spam, or whatever. WinSCP therefore supports this bug-compatibility flag: if it believes the server has this bug, it will never send its winadj@putty.projects.tartarus.org request, and will make do without its timing data.

Versions 2.3.0 and below of the SSH server software from ssh.com compute the keys for their HMAC message authentication codes incorrectly. A typical symptom of this problem is that WinSCP dies unexpectedly at the beginning of the session, saying “Incorrect MAC received on packet”.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will compute its HMAC keys in the same way as the buggy server, so that communication will still be possible. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, communication will fail.

This is an SSH-2-specific bug.

Versions below 2.0.11 of the SSH server software from ssh.com compute the keys for the session encryption incorrectly. This problem can cause various error messages, such as “Incoming packet was garbled on decryption”, or possibly even “Out of memory”.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will compute its encryption keys in the same way as the buggy server, so that communication will still be possible. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, communication will fail.

This is an SSH-2-specific bug.

Versions below 3.3 of OpenSSH and versions below 1.3.4d/1.3.5rc4 of ProFTPD/mod_sftp require SSH-2 RSA signatures to be padded with zero bytes to the same length as the RSA key modulus. The SSH-2 draft specification says that an unpadded signature MUST be accepted, so this is a bug. A typical symptom of this problem is that WinSCP mysteriously fails RSA authentication once in every few hundred attempts, and falls back to passwords. In session log file you will typically see this record:

Server refused public-key signature despite accepting key! 

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will pad its signatures in the way the buggy servers expect. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, it is likely that no damage will be done, since correct servers usually still accept padded signatures because they’re used to talking to OpenSSH.

This is an SSH-2-specific bug.

Versions below 2.3 of OpenSSH require SSH-2 public-key authentication to be done slightly differently: the data to be signed by the client contains the session ID formatted in a different way. If public-key authentication mysteriously does not work but the session log shows that WinSCP has successfully sent a signature, it might be worth enabling the workaround for this bug to see if it helps.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will sign data in the way OpenSSH expects. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, SSH-2 public-key authentication will fail.

This is an SSH-2-specific bug.

Some SSH servers cannot cope with repeat key exchange at all, and will ignore attempts by the client to start one. Since WinSCP pauses the session while performing a repeat key exchange, the effect of this would be to cause the session to hang after an hour (unless you have your rekey timeout set differently). Other, very old, SSH servers handle repeat key exchange even more badly, and disconnect upon receiving a repeat key exchange request.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will never initiate a repeat key exchange. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session should still function, but may be less secure than you would expect.

This is an SSH-2-specific bug.

When an SSH-2 channel is set up, each end announces the maximum size of data packet that it is willing to receive for that channel. Some servers ignore WinSCP’s announcement and send packets larger than WinSCP is willing to accept, causing it to report “Incoming packet was garbled on decryption”.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP never allows the channel’s flow-control window to grow large enough to allow the server to send an over-sized packet. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session will work correctly, but download performance will be less than it could be.1

An ignore message (SSH_MSG_IGNORE) is a message in the SSH protocol which can be sent from the client to the server, or from the server to the client, at any time. Either side is required to ignore the message whenever it receives it. WinSCP uses ignore messages to hide the password packet in SSH-1, so that a listener cannot tell the length of the user’s password; it also uses ignore messages for connection keepalives.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will stop using ignore messages. This means that keepalives will stop working, and WinSCP will have to fall back to a secondary defense against SSH-1 password-length eavesdropping. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session will succeed, but keepalives will not work and the session might be more vulnerable to eavesdroppers than it could be.

This is an SSH-1-specific bug. No known SSH-2 server fails to deal with SSH-2 ignore messages.

When talking to an SSH-1 server which cannot deal with ignore messages, WinSCP will attempt to disguise the length of the user’s password by sending additional padding within the password packet. This is technically a violation of the SSH-1 specification, and so WinSCP will only do it when it cannot use standards-compliant ignore messages as camouflage. In this sense, for a server to refuse to accept a padded password packet is not really a bug, but it does make life inconvenient if the server can also not handle ignore messages.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will assume that neither ignore messages nor padding are acceptable, and that it thus has no choice but to send the user’s password with no form of camouflage, so that an eavesdropping user will be easily able to find out the exact length of the password. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session will succeed, but will be more vulnerable to eavesdroppers than it could be.

This is an SSH-1-specific bug. SSH-2 is secure against this type of attack.

Some SSH-1 servers cannot deal with RSA authentication messages at all. If Pageant is running and contains any SSH-1 keys, WinSCP will normally automatically try RSA authentication before falling back to passwords, so these servers will crash when they see the RSA attempt.

If this bug is detected, WinSCP will go straight to password authentication. If this bug is enabled when talking to a correct server, the session will succeed, but of course RSA authentication will be impossible.

This is an SSH-1-specific bug.

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