VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2012-5975

critical
Published 2012-12-04 · Modified 2026-04-29
💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation
CVSS v3
—
CVSS v4 NEW
—
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
10.0

Description

The SSH USERAUTH CHANGE REQUEST feature in SSH Tectia Server 6.0.4 through 6.0.20, 6.1.0 through 6.1.12, 6.2.0 through 6.2.5, and 6.3.0 through 6.3.2 on UNIX and Linux, when old-style password authentication is enabled, allows remote attackers to bypass authentication via a crafted session involving entry of blank passwords, as demonstrated by a root login session from a modified OpenSSH client with an added input_userauth_passwd_changereq call in sshconnect2.c.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA
—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-23156 remote unix verified
Metasploit · 2012-12-05

(SSH.com Communications) SSH Tectia - USERAUTH Change Request Password Reset (Metasploit)

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.
EDB-23082 remote linux verified
kingcope · 2012-12-02

(SSH.com Communications) SSH Tectia (SSH < 2.0-6.1.9.95 / Tectia 6.1.9.95) - Remote Authentication Bypass

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Metasploit modules

exploit_unix/ssh/tectia_passwd_changereq rank 600
Tectia SSH USERAUTH Change Request Password Reset Vulnerability
Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact
linux Linux kernel Fixed 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
— Not affected —

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
sshtectia_server6.0.4
sshtectia_server6.0.5
sshtectia_server6.0.6
sshtectia_server6.0.7
sshtectia_server6.0.8
sshtectia_server6.0.9
sshtectia_server6.0.10
sshtectia_server6.0.11
sshtectia_server6.0.12
sshtectia_server6.0.13
sshtectia_server6.0.14
sshtectia_server6.0.17
sshtectia_server6.0.18
sshtectia_server6.0.19
sshtectia_server6.0.20.
sshtectia_server6.1.0
sshtectia_server6.1.1
sshtectia_server6.1.2
sshtectia_server6.1.3
sshtectia_server6.1.4
sshtectia_server6.1.5
sshtectia_server6.1.6
sshtectia_server6.1.7
sshtectia_server6.1.8
sshtectia_server6.1.9
sshtectia_server6.1.12
sshtectia_server6.2.0
sshtectia_server6.2.1
sshtectia_server6.2.2
sshtectia_server6.2.3
sshtectia_server6.2.4
sshtectia_server6.2.5
sshtectia_server6.3.0
sshtectia_server6.3.1
sshtectia_server6.3.2

References

CWEs

CWE-287

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.