Add protection for private keys at rest in RAM against speculation

and memory sidechannel attacks like Spectre, Meltdown, Rowhammer and
Rambleed. This change encrypts private keys when they are not in use
with a symmetic key that is derived from a relatively large "prekey"
consisting of random data (currently 16KB).

Attackers must recover the entire prekey with high accuracy before
they can attempt to decrypt the shielded private key, but the current
generation of attacks have bit error rates that, when applied
cumulatively to the entire prekey, make this unlikely.

Implementation-wise, keys are encrypted "shielded" when loaded and then
automatically and transparently unshielded when used for signatures or
when being saved/serialised.

Hopefully we can remove this in a few years time when computer
architecture has become less unsafe.

been in snaps for a bit already; thanks deraadt@

ok dtucker@ deraadt@

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/usr.bin/ssh/sshconnect.c b/usr.bin/ssh/sshconnect.c
index 9e865638f87..fb577c1731a 100644
--- a/usr.bin/ssh/sshconnect.c
+++ b/usr.bin/ssh/sshconnect.c
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-/* $OpenBSD: sshconnect.c,v 1.315 2019/05/03 03:27:38 dtucker Exp $ */
+/* $OpenBSD: sshconnect.c,v 1.316 2019/06/21 04:21:04 djm Exp $ */
 /*
  * Author: Tatu Ylonen <ylo@cs.hut.fi>
  * Copyright (c) 1995 Tatu Ylonen <ylo@cs.hut.fi>, Espoo, Finland
@@ -1361,7 +1361,7 @@ ssh_local_cmd(const char *args)
 }
 
 void
-maybe_add_key_to_agent(char *authfile, const struct sshkey *private,
+maybe_add_key_to_agent(char *authfile, struct sshkey *private,
     char *comment, char *passphrase)
 {
 	int auth_sock = -1, r;