Upgrade OpenSSH on AIX to 9.6 or above.

I am getting dinged about CVE-2023-51385 from Qualys.

AIX has this notice: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7125640

Now, IBM may or may not have done a dandy job of stopping the vulnerability. However if they just patch an existing version of OpenSSH and do not go to a higher level of OpenSSH it doesn't make a difference as far as the scanning services go. All they do is check your current version of OpenSSH and if you are not on a certain minimum level then they assume that you are still susceptible to the vulnerability. I do not fault the scanning services. After all, if the vulnerability was that an exploit will cause your system to overheat and shutdown do you really want them to see if that occurs? So if the general belief for this CVE is that you need to be on 9.6 or higher of OpenSSH then any amount of patching that IBM does to some 8.1 version is not going to pass scanning.

So, after all that patching I still am seeing:

lslpp -L | grep -i openssh.base.client

openssh.base.client 8.1.112.2000 CE F Open Secure Shell Command

ssh -vvv somelocation

OpenSSH_8.1p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1v 1 Aug 2023

I opened a case with IBM on this and they replied:

Hi Robert,

The last available openssh version for AIX can be obtained from the IBM Webpack Download site:

https://www-01.ibm.com/marketing/iwm/iwm/web/pickUrxNew.do?source=aixbp

The most recent openssh v8 and v9 versions available are:

VRMF: 8.1.112.2000

VRMF: 9.2.112.2000

We do plan on shipping a higher openssh version later this year, but for now we are addressing security vulnerabilities through ifixes.

There are many technical and even legal issues that must be resolved before we can ship a newer version of opensource software.

So the levels of many applications on AIX ... such as sendmail and bind ... are always never at the highest available versions.

And when there is a security vulnerability that affects the version of software that we ship and support on AIX, IBM will provide a patch for the security vulnerability.

This has been the standard AIX practice.