227 pointsby josemrban hour ago19 comments
  • nxobject13 minutes ago
    Above all, I’m a little sad that the musl developers decided to make a lot of “well it’s convenient” changes to core crypto functions — at least without the level of auditing that would have caught this! It’s tarnished their reputation in my eyes a little.
    • rustyhancocka few seconds ago
      I think everyone is over fixated on AI finding complex bugs beyond a typical person's understanding either to locate or exploit.

      I think for any one of those bugs there might simply be half a dozen footguns or bugs that once it's spelled out you wonder how anyone let it slide.

      I think that's the case where LLMs might indentify most.

      It's challenging though as the current AI audits produce so many false positives it's hard to know when it's being pedantic or when it's genuinely caught a human being a bone head

  • scandinavian13 minutes ago
    Did anyone get it to work? I tried on the official alpine docker image, enabled password login for root. The shadow entry has ! as password by default, this didn't work with a > 256 character password (i also did passwd -l which also does !). I manually changed it to * and it still didn't work.

    Am I doing anything wrong here?

    OpenSSH_10.3p1, OpenSSL 3.5.9 29 Sep 2026

    PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.24"

  • neuroticnews2526 minutes ago
    That's a well-made site, yet I feel nothing.
    • cpach23 minutes ago
      LLM output fatigue?
    • tasuki8 minutes ago
      Maybe that's on you though. I enjoyed it, though the discrepancy between the `*sshole` name and the `sshhole.com` domain made me twitch. How is anyone[0] obsessive enough to find this and write it up and yet not obsessive enough to make the amount of `h` consistent?

      [0]: Be they human or LLM. Or an entity with any proportion of the two. I do not judge nor discriminate.

      • glibg10b2 minutes ago
        Look closely. The second h is behind the word and almost as dark as the background
    • jonstewart14 minutes ago
      What is dead can never die. All blueteamers are ironborn these days.
  • draxen4 minutes ago
    I avoided using alpine-based containers ever since finding out a lot of Linux server software is actually Linux + SystemD software. The union set API of both Linux and SystemD seems to be the default "Linux API" today.
    • sam_lowry_a few seconds ago
      I use alpine-based containers whenever I can just to keep the world safer from SystemD rotting Linux.
  • RVuRnvbM2e5 minutes ago
    Wait so musl, famously a stickler for standards, just changed the behaviour of a POSIX function?
  • illusive408031 minutes ago
    From the other thread’s source [1], it affects musl without PAM. You can set PasswordAuthentication=no or update to remediate.

    [1] https://hachyderm.io/@damienmiller/117563026759098135

  • oefrhaa minute ago
    [delayed]
  • hypfer30 minutes ago
    What is out there that uses musl without PAM and hosts an OpenSSH SSHd with PasswordAuthentication?

    As in: "Actually out there"

    The hypothetical Alpine exists, yes, but what runs that like that?

    • jbyers27 minutes ago
      A large number of Docker containers?

      Edit: Sure, a small minority presumably run sshd under these conditions. But a small minority times the number of Alpine containers still gets to a large absolute number with a trivial exploit. It's bad.

      Edit 2: You really don't need to look very hard to find public container examples at million-download scale.

      • ekidd23 minutes ago
        Many, many Docker containers rely on "docker exec" or the kubectl equivalent to gain CLI access when needed. To have sshd in an Alpine Docker container, you're generally need to be running init and a bunch of demons, not just a single standalone service.

        I'm guessing in practice relatively few people are actually exposed. But if they are, it's catastrophic.

      • stingraycharles21 minutes ago
        Docker containers run sshd?
      • hypfer25 minutes ago
        Docker containers that run sshds?
    • Bender20 minutes ago
      Possibly public SFTP servers. I have allowed null passwords in the past for anonymous public SFTP and I run Alpine Linux exclusively for my servers both VM's and physical. The shadow package (PAM) did not get installed by default. I installed it but I had to specify it in the installation.

      I will activate one for people to play around with:

          sftp hn@ping.altchan.org
    • figassis4 minutes ago
      Agent sandboxes today probably
  • stogota minute ago
    Of all the named vulnerabilities, I appreciate the history lesson and screenshots of how it got there
  • pluc36 minutes ago
    A+ name
  • cube0025 minutes ago
    > except a lot of programs never check for NULL. they just compare whatever crypt() gives back with the stored field, hit the NULL, and crash

    > so musl (the libc under alpine) goes ok fine, crypt() just won't return NULL anymore. if it fails, it returns a single character instead.

    Considering it's been accepted that crashing if malloc returns a NULL is your fault, did musl really feel the need to accommodate bad implementations like this or is this just AI dribble?

    • red75prime2 minutes ago
      "unfortunately, a large portion of programs which call crypt are not prepared for its failure and do not check that the return value is non-null before using it. thus, always "succeeding" but giving an unmatchable hash is reportedly a better behavior than failing on error." [1]

      [1] https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=b3c4cc121f70f...

    • Good4boothee3 minutes ago
      > did musl really feel the need to accommodate bad implementations like this

      I don't know about this specific case but in general? Yes, totally. No one is going to fix all existing software that depends on libs behaving exactly as glibc, you have to accept some trade-offs. Either your new implementation stops being perfectly simple and clean, or no one uses it.

  • bombcar35 minutes ago
    The real name of this is sshole - the is the "star" of the show, after all.
    • yreg31 minutes ago
      *sshole, the * is the star of the show

      You can use \ to escape formatting.

  • gosen27 minutes ago
    I really like creativity in the name, the way website built and the content

    "tl;dr" was a bit of a downgrade though, but that's fine

    it's a nice way to promote the company behind it

  • jdw6423 minutes ago
    I liked that this site explained the vulnerability in an easy-to-understand way.
  • lclc14 minutes ago
    One more reason to build your (own) Docker images on 'FROM scratch' (basically nothing).
    • Good4bootheea minute ago
      No one runs sshd in containers, at least I hope so. What would even be the point when you have docker/kubectl commands available?
    • blueflow11 minutes ago
      No, the Alpine containers don't come with sshd preinstalled. You'd have to manually install via dockerfile and leave it unconfigured.
  • ChrisRR14 minutes ago
    Can we just have a site with the text and images without the awkward scrolling crap? Hijacking basic features is an instant click away from sites for me

    Edit: It seems to work fine on mobile. I'm not sure why the scrolling behaviour was added on the desktop version of the site

  • henry70011 minutes ago
    at this point my only reaction is "are you fucking kidding me"
  • rvz39 minutes ago
  • sneela21 minutes ago
    Yet another clankered finding creating a clankered website with clankered explanations. To be fair, this one's a lot better than the other clankered equivalents, but I wonder whether these people even know enough about their bug to have their own write-up?

    Also, what's with this damn trend of typing in lowercase only? Why is this a thing?

    > oh did i say "i"? sorry. i had agent swarms. a lot of them. let's not get into it

    Still a cool finding... it's just the communication is becoming a lot worse these days - I want to understand the findings please, not be impressed by your webpage! Biggest gripe in recent memory is https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/skitter-creek-bath-salts

    • BugsJustFindMe5 minutes ago
      > Also, what's with this damn trend of typing in lowercase only?

      Anticapitalism.