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Architecture Astronaut! TCP is a stream protocol. A terminal program is expected to honor the stream protocol: I can use a terminal program to speak SMTP or HTTP. I can paste binary shit into it and copy binary shit out of it (some caveats apply).

If you're gonna jack some control protocol into a session which is sitting directly on the stream protocol, that's on you. This is as airtight as injecting a control protocol into SMTP or HTTP. Encapsulate the entire protocol (obviously this requires presence on both ends), open a second channel (same), or go home. It's worth noting that the "protocol" drops a helper script on the other side; so theoretically it is possible for them to achieve encapsulation, but doing it properly might require additional permissions / access.

Obviously they published a fix, since that's how the exploit was reverse engineered. This is "...what happens when terminal output is able to impersonate one side of that feature's protocol."



> TCP is a stream protocol

Which has nothing to do with terminals, because nobody runs terminals directly over TCP. Telnet wasn’t simply sending terminal bytes over TCP, it has its own complex system of escape sequences and protocol negotiation (IAC WILL/WONT/DO/DONT/SB/SE, numerous Telnet options). SSH is even further from raw TCP than Telnet was

And a Unix pty isn’t a simple stream either. Consider SIGWINCH




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