Efros Config Inspector benefits even those who don’t use it

The Efros Config Inspector software package, designed to control the security of active network equipment configurations, virtualization environments, operating systems – and more recently, business process automation tools (see more details here), has been successfully used by various users for more than eight years. Given the trends in the development of information technologies and cyber defense tools, developers pay special attention to cross-platform solutions.

To implement the configuration management functions that users will appreciate in our next winter release, the OpenSSH cross-platform package was selected. It is supported by most Linux distributions, and more recently, by the Windows operating system family.

An analysis of the capabilities of the package revealed an error: the client, which was a Cisco router, disconnected from the server. In the server code from the OpenSSH package, there is so-called compatibility support with various devices, in particular with Cisco devices. It allows you to specify the protocol of interaction between the client and server, depending on the types of devices used. After a detailed study, it became clear that during the porting of the OpenSSH package to Windows, this compatibility support was disabled due to the specifics of porting.

To eliminate the vulnerability, the source code of the SSH server program from OpenSSH was analyzed. In order to debug the mechanism of client-server interaction, taking into account the peculiarities of porting to Windows, a corresponding revision was carried out. It was carried out in such a way as to solve the problem not only for Cisco routers, but potentially for all devices that will interact with the SSH server. After successful completion of work and internal testing, Gazinformservice decided to transfer the source code changes to the OpenSSH developers for Windows.

The development community appreciated the contribution to the development of the package and the edits were accepted. Thus, the Efros Config Inspector development team did not just modify the open source solution in their own interests, but proposed a fixed version to all interested users of the OpenSSH software package.

Using open source software allows you to solve business problems faster – today no one has any doubt about this. But something needs to be done in response to the development of "free" software in the interests of the entire IT community – in gratitude and support.

Sergey Nikitin,
Product Manager, Gazinformservice LLC