Comment by hnfong

I wouldn't say the bug is only in musl. Musl is probably the "worst" offender here (at least choose something other than "*"!), but the change in sshd was also a little suspect. i.e. the "let's find a user and take their salt (and hashing algorithm) and use it to compute and compare the hash to avoid timing attacks" change.

I haven't thought it through, but I suspect in an ideal world, sshd shouldn't have accepted the user password regardless of the outcome of crypt() if the user did not exist and it only pretended to go through the motions to avoid a timing attack.

Did look into their patch yesterday(?) which seemed to mitigate this issue which they (rightfully IMHO) consider caused by musl. But it seems their fix is to do a sanity check on the supposed hashed password char length, and thus still theoretically still allowing the possibility of those "!!!INVALID_PASSWORD!!!" suggestions to fall through....