CVE-2018-20685

In OpenSSH 7.9, scp.c in the scp client allows remote SSH servers to bypass intended access restrictions via the filename of . or an empty filename. The impact is modifying the permissions of the target directory on the client side.

This issue affects the scp client shipped with openssh. The SSH protocol or the SSH client is not affected. For more detailed analysis please refer to: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1665785#c4

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

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.