Download tarballs from https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/releases/dropbear-2022.82.tar.bz2 or https://mirror.dropbear.nl/mirror/dropbear-2022.82.tar.bz2

Features and Changes:

• Implemented OpenSSH format private key handling for dropbearconvert. Keys can be read in OpenSSH format or the old PEM format. Keys are now written in OpenSSH format rather than PEM. ED25519 support is now correct. DSS keys are still PEM format.

• Use SHA256 for key fingerprints

• Reworked -v verbose printing, specifying multiple times will increase verbosity. -vvvv is equivalent to the old DEBUG_TRACE -v level, it can be configured at compile time in localoptions.h (see default_options.h) Lower -v options can be used to check connection progress or algorithm negotiation. Thanks to Hans Harder for the implementation

  localoptions.h DEBUG_TRACE should be set to 4 for the same result as the previous DEBUG_TRACE 1.

• Added server support for U2F/FIDO keys (ecdsa-sk and ed25519-sk) in authorized_keys. no-touch-required option isn't allowed yet. Thanks to Egor Duda for the implementation

• autoconf output (configure script etc) is now committed to version control. It isn't necessary to run "autoconf" any more on a checkout.

• sha1 will be omitted from the build if KEX/signing/MAC algorithms don't require it. Instead sha256 is used for random number generation. See sysoptions.h to see which algorithms require which hashes.

• Set SSH_PUBKEYINFO environment variable based on the authorized_keys entry used for auth. The first word of the comment after the key is used (must only have characters a-z A-Z 0-9 .,_-+@) Patch from Hans Harder, modified by Matt Johnston

• Let dbclient multihop mode be used with '-J'. Patch from Hans Harder

• Allow home-directory relative paths ~/path for various settings and command line options. *_PRIV_FILENAME DROPBEAR_PIDFILE SFTPSERVER_PATH MOTD_FILENAME Thanks to Begley Brothers Inc

  The default DROPBEAR_DEFAULT_CLI_AUTHKEY has now changed, it now needs a tilde prefix.

• LANG environment variable is carried over from the Dropbear server process From Maxim Kochetkov

• Add /usr/sbin and /sbin to $PATH when logging in as root. Patch from Raphaël Hertzog https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=903403

• Added client option "-o DisableTrivialAuth". This can be used to prevent the server immediately accepting successful authentication (before any auth request) which could cause UI confusion and security issues with agent forwarding - it isn't clear which host is prompting to use a key. Thanks to Manfred Kaiser from Austrian MilCERT

• Add -q client option to hide remote banner, from Hans Harder

• Add -e option to pass all server environment variables to child processes. This should be used with caution. Patch from Roland Vollgraf (github #118)

• Use DSCP for QoS traffic classes. Priority (tty) traffic is now set to AF21 "interactive". Previously TOS classes were used, they are not used by modern traffic classifiers. Non-tty traffic is left at default priority.

• Disable dh-group1 key exchange by default. It has been disabled server side by default since 2018.

• Removed Twofish cipher

Fixes:

• Fix flushing channel data when pty was allocated (github #85) Data wasn't completely transmitted at channel close. Reported and initial patch thanks to Yousong Zhou

• Dropbear now re-executes itself rather than just forking for each connection (only on Linux). This allows ASLR to randomise address space for each connection as a security mitigation. It should not have any visible impact

  • if there are any performance impacts in the wild please report it.

• Check authorized_keys permissions as the user, fixes NFS squash root. Patch from Chris Dragan (github #107)

• A missing home directory is now non-fatal, starting in / instead

• Fixed IPv6 [address]:port parsing for dbclient -b Reported by Fabio Molinari

• Improve error logging so that they are logged on the server rather than being sent to the client over the connection

• Max window size is increased to 10MB, more graceful fallback if it's invalid.

• Fix correctness of Dropbear's handling of global requests. Patch from Dirkjan Bussink

• Fix some small bugs found by fuzzers, null pointer dereference crash and leaks (post authentication)

• $HOME variable is used before /etc/passwd when expanding paths such as ~/.ssh/id_dropbear (for the client). Patch from Matt Robinson

• C89 build fixes from Guillaume Picquet

Infrastructure:

• Improvements to fuzzers. Added post-auth fuzzer, and a mutator that can handle the structure of SSH packet streams. Added cifuzz to run on commits and pull requests. Thanks to OSS-Fuzz for the tools/clusters and reward funding.

• Dropbear source tarballs generated by release.sh are now reproducible from a Git or Mercurial checkout, they will be identical on any system. Tested on ubuntu and macos.

• Added some integration testing using pytest. Currently this has tests for various channel handling edge cases, ASLR fork randomisation, dropbearconvert, and SSH_PUBKEYINFO

• Set up github actions. This runs the pytest suite and other checks.

  • build matrix includes c89, dropbearmulti, bundled libtom, macos, DEBUG_TRACE
  • test for configure script regeneration
  • build a tarball for external reproducibility