Certain Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5 packages for OpenSSH, as signed in August 2008 using a legitimate Red Hat GPG key, contain an externally introduced modification (Trojan Horse) that allows the package authors to have an unknown impact. NOTE: since the malicious packages were not distributed from any official Red Hat sources, the scope of this issue is restricted to users who may have obtained these packages through unofficial distribution points. As of 20080827, no unofficial distributions of this software are known.

OpenSSH 5.6 and earlier, when J-PAKE is enabled, does not properly validate the public parameters in the J-PAKE protocol, which allows remote attackers to bypass the need for knowledge of the shared secret, and successfully authenticate, by sending crafted values in each round of the protocol, a related issue to CVE-2010-4252.

The default configuration of OpenSSH through 6.1 enforces a fixed time limit between establishing a TCP connection and completing a login, which makes it easier for remote attackers to cause a denial of service (connection-slot exhaustion) by periodically making many new TCP connections.