Show HN: Sshole-audit – Find, prove and fix *sshole: the OpenSSH password bypass

Category: security

Tags: security, ssh, vulnerability-scanning, shell, alpine, mitigation

Score: 7.0/10 (Innovation: 6, Technical: 7, Documentation: 9, Utility: 6)

sshole-audit is a read-only audit toolkit for a specific OpenSSH vulnerability (musl libc without PAM allows long passwords to bypass `*` shadow accounts), providing scanning, fleet discovery, verdict classification, and a safe fix script. It is notable for its defensive, non-destructive design—no exploit code, no hash leakage, careful handling of sshd-session/sshd-auth binaries, live daemon-vs-disk detection, and PAM-in-force checks. Documentation is exceptionally thorough for a security tool, though the vulnerability is niche and only affects a narrow musl-without-PAM configuration.

Target audience: devops and backend engineers running Alpine/musl-based Linux fleets

Repository: https://github.com/schappim/sshole-audit · Shell · MIT

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