Comment by cdilld

the more i read about this, the more i'm convinced, contrary to what seems to be the prevailing opinion here, that this is primarily an OpenSSH logic bug.

which is not to say that crypt() is well designed or specified - it's clearly deficient. but I can't fathom how the OpenSSH maintainers could come to the conclusion that the root cause is "outside OpenSSH itself" when the root cause is that OpenSSH's mitigation of timing attacks rested on faulty assumptions about the return value of crypt().