What did we learn? That remote code execution is a thing? That misplaced trust in [dev] tools is often regretted? That modern software design is ass? If you've been paying attention, all of that has been obvious.
SSH is a solution from the 90s. It's Telnet with a couple extra features bolted on, and despite being called the "secure" shell, is literally less secure than Telnet+TLS would be. There's so much stupid-yet-glorified bullshit implemented over SSH, because lazy assholes had a tunnel into a server with a user session, and decided "why implement a whole extra protocol for network transport and secure connections for my application? I already have an authenticated user session, in this very specific protocol, computing design, and network architecture. who care if nobody else on the planet but computer nerds have used something like this since 2000? works for me!" Discard the concepts learned from distributed OSes, ignore all the advanced AuthN+Z that had been developed, embrace the shittiest, easiest thing you can.
These "SSH agents" aren't bananas. We refused to get off our stupid lazy asses to build the right tool for the job. So we had to keep shoving more shit into pre-existing tools that were never designed for what we decided to do with it. We have no right to pretend we're surprised.
This is the world we have made. All of you, and me too. Either with your labor or your silent compliance. If it's not SSH, it's politics, commerce, school, and everything else. We live every day in the shit-pile we carved for ourselves, and every day that we don't do something about it, we throw another shovel on the pile. You don't get to sit there shoveling shit and pretend this is a fucking surprise, or crazy. You're holding a shovel.
It's not the developers who did this, it's the "network security" people. If you block all outgoing ports except for HTTPS and ssh, everything is henceforth going to be tunneled over HTTPS or ssh.
This is also the reason why, if you allow outgoing HTTPS connections, you should as a general rule be allowing all outgoing connections except for SMTP. Because actually malicious traffic is just going to be tunneled over HTTPS anyway and all you're doing is inhibiting the deployment of any new protocols that don't take on the complexity and inefficiency of the tunnel.
It's an extremely common exception for exactly the reason you don't like it. If you block it you get widespread breakage because so many things use it. Then even more things use it because it's allowed and novel protocols aren't.
And what do you think happens in the places that do block ssh, instead of unblocking other things? I hope you like VSCode over ssh over HTTPS VPN.
To the contrary, i find the ssh keypair authentication (and certificates) the best kind of authentication i know. And it integrates with FIDO2 without prior set up.
I wish web logins would be more like what SSH does.
Man, I'm getting hard tinfoil conspiracy vibes from this one. Not everything in life is done with malicious intent. Most of the time it's humans trying to do the best they can come up with under pressure.
Maybe go touch some grass once in a while, it's healthy for the soul.
Also, please make a suggestion on how to build a better SSH protocol. Complaints are kind of useless without constructive criticism.
TLS is used for this inside corporate environments because it can be intercepted by snakeoil CA using firewalls.
So I'd argue it's not as secure as SSH, where an MITM actor implies a compromise of the cryptographic algorithms used underneath or an exploit like the xz case.
1) I never said it was malicious, 2) humans do not try to do their best (have you looked around lately?), 3) complaints are entirely useful regardless of constructive criticism, they are literally user feedback
SSH is a solution from the 90s. It's Telnet with a couple extra features bolted on, and despite being called the "secure" shell, is literally less secure than Telnet+TLS would be. There's so much stupid-yet-glorified bullshit implemented over SSH, because lazy assholes had a tunnel into a server with a user session, and decided "why implement a whole extra protocol for network transport and secure connections for my application? I already have an authenticated user session, in this very specific protocol, computing design, and network architecture. who care if nobody else on the planet but computer nerds have used something like this since 2000? works for me!" Discard the concepts learned from distributed OSes, ignore all the advanced AuthN+Z that had been developed, embrace the shittiest, easiest thing you can.
These "SSH agents" aren't bananas. We refused to get off our stupid lazy asses to build the right tool for the job. So we had to keep shoving more shit into pre-existing tools that were never designed for what we decided to do with it. We have no right to pretend we're surprised.
This is the world we have made. All of you, and me too. Either with your labor or your silent compliance. If it's not SSH, it's politics, commerce, school, and everything else. We live every day in the shit-pile we carved for ourselves, and every day that we don't do something about it, we throw another shovel on the pile. You don't get to sit there shoveling shit and pretend this is a fucking surprise, or crazy. You're holding a shovel.