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Re: Security Update from MAC breaks ssh -X

To: openssh-unix-dev@mindrot.org
Subject: Re: Security Update from MAC breaks ssh -X
From: John Davidorff Pell <johnpell@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:30:18 -0700
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On Mar 19, 2007, at 4:26 PM, William Ahern wrote:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 09:25:49AM +1100, Darren Tucker wrote:
This has been the default for years, I don't know why you're only seeing problems now (unless Apple used to change the default in their packages
and now don't?)

The original poster is running Mac OS X 10.3.9. 10.3 is 3 years old.

For one thing, Apple hasn't updated their version of OpenSSH for years.
Which patches they backport is anyone's guess. They certainly haven't
backported control socket mastering.

Apple doesn't backport much of anything in the open source projects, they just update the the latest release. At the same time, Apple doesn't update *any* software in Mac OS X unless there are security flaws or other bug fixes. Mac OS X is a commercial operating system that cannot afford the release-early-and-fix-often mentality. It has to work (well enough) the first time, and not break later. (Yes, I know that this doesn't always happen. Its /supposed/ to work this way.)

Likewise for OpenSSL. Basically, Apple ceased all Unix environment
development the moment OS X shipped. Soon porting Unix apps to OS X will be
as fun as to Microsoft's POSIX interface.

That's just not true. With each major release of Mac OS X, Apple syncs with the FreeBSD userland. Almost all commands that were shipping with FreeBSD 5.0 are the versions in Tiger. In some cases, Tiger versions have been updated due to security fixes or just bug fixes, as I mentioned above. That's not all that old.

Specifically for OpenSSH. Apple updated to OpenSSH 3.8 (from 3.6) in a security update sometime after 10.4.6 (it might simply have been in 10.4.7, I don't remember). The latest security update came up to OpenSSH 4.5.



The moral of the story: If you want Apple to update a working open source package in between major releases, then find and report [to Apple] a security flaw that is fixed in the version of the package that you want Apple to update to. ;-)



JP



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