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I brought this attack up on reddit 3 years ago. http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/xf6pa/openssh_offers_your_public_keys_to_all_servers/ http://www.reddit

• baby 11y ago
  "attack"
  • eru 11y ago
    It's an attack on privacy expectations. There are at least two ways to escalate from here: - One if agent forwarding is enabled. - Another: learning details like people's names is often a first step in social engineering.
    • ultramancool 11y ago
      There's also another leak which isn't really shown here and that leak is that, with just a public key, you can offer to servers and they'll tell you if it's present or not. Using this you could scan the internet (given 6-12 hours and a shitty VPS that you can throw away this is quite possible) for someone's public key to find all of their servers, which could lead to a bypass of DDoS protection, identification of a Tor hidden service, etc.
      • versteegen 11y ago
        Yep, see also Rachelbythebay's comment in this thread (in particular the second post she links to); this is definitely exploitable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008012
    • baby 11y ago
      > It's an attack on privacy expectations. It's a misunderstanding of the word "public"