Plaintext-Dependent Decryption: A Formal Security Treatment of SSH-CTR

This paper presents a formal security analysis of SSH in counter mode in a security model that accurately captures the capabilities of real-world attackers, as well as security-relevant features of the SSH specifications and the OpenSSH implementation of SSH. Under reasonable assumptions on the block cipher and MAC algorithms used to construct the SSH Binary Packet Protocol (BPP), we are able to show that the SSH BPP meets a strong and appropriate notion of security: indistinguishability under buffered, stateful chosen-ciphertext attacks. This result helps to bridge the gap between the existing security analysis of the SSH BPP by Bellare et al. and the recently discovered attacks against the SSH BPP by Albrecht et al. which partially invalidate that analysis.