Widely-Used PuTTY SSH Client Found Vulnerable to Key Recovery Attack
Users are being notified by the developers of the PuTTY Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet client about a serious flaw that affects versions 0.68 through 0.80 and has the potential to be used to fully recover NIST P-521 (ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) private keys.
The vulnerability has been given the CVE designation CVE-2024-31497, and researchers Fabian Bäumer and Marcus Brinkmann of the Ruhr University Bochum are credited with making the discovery.
The vulnerability has the effect of compromising the private key, according to an alert from the PuTTY project.
With just a few dozen signed communications and the public key, an attacker can obtain enough information to obtain the private key and then fabricate signatures appearing to be from you, giving them the ability to, for example, access a...