OpenSSH Rushes Patches for ‘SSHole’ Authentication Bypass
OpenSSH has rolled out emergency patches for a high-severity authentication bypass that allows attackers to log in using very long passwords.
Dubbed SSHole and tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score of 8.1), the security defect affects the OpenSSH server (sshd) on Linux distributions that use the musl libc implementation with the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) disabled.
A “misinterpretation of whether a string is intended to be a password hash” allows attackers to access certain accounts using any password that has between 257 and 1,024 characters.
Some accounts, such as root, should never accept a password, but in Linux distributions such as Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot, Yocto, and others, they do, Wakefield security researcher Özgün Kültekin says.
According to OpenSSH developer Damien Miller, the flaw is not in sshd itself, but can be exploited via sshd. Fixes were included in OpenSSH 10.6p2.
“We are making this release as fast as possible (we learned...
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