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Commit b4e11108 authored by Simon Tatham's avatar Simon Tatham
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Relax criteria for accepting agent-forwarding channel-opens.

Previously, the instant at which we send to the server a request to
enable agent forwarding (the "auth-agent-req@openssh.com" channel
request, or SSH1_CMSG_AGENT_REQUEST_FORWARDING) was also the instant
at which we set a flag indicating that we're prepared to accept
attempts from the server to open a channel to talk to the forwarded
agent. If the server attempts that when we haven't sent a forwarding
request, we treat it with suspicion, and reject it.

But it turns out that at least one SSH server does this, for what
seems to be a _somewhat_ sensible purpose, and OpenSSH accepts it. So,
on the basis that the @openssh.com domain suffix makes them the
arbiters of this part of the spec, I'm following their practice. I've
removed the 'agent_fwd_enabled' flag from both connection layer
implementations, together with the ConnectionLayer method that sets
it; now agent-forwarding CHANNEL_OPENs are gated only on the questions
of whether agent forwarding was permitted in the configuration and
whether an agent actually exists to talk to, and not also whether we
had previously sent a message to the server announcing it.

(The change to this condition is also applied in the SSH-1 agent
forwarding code, mostly for the sake of keeping things parallel where
possible. I think it doesn't actually make a difference in SSH-1,
because in SSH-1, it's not _possible_ for the server to try to open an
agent channel before the main channel is set up, due to the entirely
separate setup phase of the protocol.)

The use case is a proxy host which makes a secondary SSH connection to
a real destination host. A user has run into one of these recently,
announcing a version banner of "SSH-2.0-FudoSSH", which relies on
agent forwarding to authenticate the secondary connection. You connect
to the proxy host and authenticate with a username string of the form
"realusername#real.destination.host", and then, at the start of the
connection protocol, the server immediately opens a channel back to
your SSH agent which it uses to authenticate to the destination host.
And it delays answering any CHANNEL_OPEN requests from the client
until that's all done. For example (seen from the client's POV,
although the server's CHANNEL_OPEN may well have been _sent_ up front
rather than in response to the client's):

client: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN "session"
server: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN "auth-agent@openssh.com"
client: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN_CONFIRMATION to the auth-agent request
        <- data is exchanged on the agent channel; proxy host uses
           that signature to log in to the destination host ->
server: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN_CONFIRMATION to the session request

With PuTTY, this wasn't working, because at the point when the server
sends the auth-agent CHANNEL_OPEN, we had not yet had any opportunity
to send auth-agent-req (because that has to wait until we've had a
CHANNEL_OPEN_CONFIRMATION). So we were rejecting the server's
CHANNEL_OPEN, which broke this workflow:

client: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN "session"
server: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN "auth-agent@openssh.com"
client: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN_FAILURE to the auth-agent request
        (hey, I haven't told you you can do that yet!)
server: SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN_FAILURE to the session request
        (in that case, no shell session for you!)
parent 04c50b6c
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