CVE-2018-20685

Red Hat statement

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

Red Hat mitigation

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.