CVE-2010-4478

Publication date 6 December 2010

Last updated 6 June 2026

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

OpenSSH 5.6 and earlier, when J-PAKE is enabled, does not properly validate the public parameters in the J-PAKE protocol, which allows remote attackers to bypass the need for knowledge of the shared secret, and successfully authenticate, by sending crafted values in each round of the protocol, a related issue to CVE-2010-4252.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
openssh	10.10 maverick	Not affected
	10.04 LTS lucid	Not affected
	9.10 karmic	Not affected
	8.04 LTS hardy	Not affected
	6.06 LTS dapper	Not affected

Notes

sbeattie

openssh in karmic and prior does not include J-PAKE auth support; in lucid and maverick it's present but not enabled at compile time. Added a QRT regression test that looks for client-side support.

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
openssh	Upstream: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/jpake.c.diff?r1=1.4;r2=1.5

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	9.8 · Critical
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

References

Other references

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2010-4478