CVE-2019-6109

An issue was discovered in OpenSSH 7.9. Due to missing character encoding in the progress display, a malicious server (or Man-in-The-Middle attacker) can employ crafted object names to manipulate the client output, e.g., by using ANSI control codes to hide additional files being transferred. This affects refresh_progress_meter() in progressmeter.c.

Mitigation

This issue only affects the users of scp binary which is a part of openssh-clients package. Other usage of SSH protocol or other ssh clients is not affected. Administrators can uninstall openssh-clients for additional protection against accidental usage of this binary. Removing the openssh-clients package will make binaries like scp and ssh etc unavailable on that system.

Note: To exploit this flaw, the victim needs to connect to a malicious SSH server or MITM (Man-in-the-middle) the scp connection, both of which can be detected by the system administrator via a change in the host key of the SSH server. Further, if connections via scp are made to only trusted SSH servers, then those use-cases are not vulnerable to this security flaw.