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Dropbear - Embedded SSH Daemonology

A Bear of Very Little Brain

The name Dropbear is intriguing since it makes me think of grizzlies and gummy bears. Real Aussies know that a Drop Bear is a carnivorous marsupial with a particular taste for foreign hikers.  I love sugar - who doesn't - but I should not eat it anymore.  I found that cinnamon makes a good substitute in most things, but I digress, this is not supposed to be a treatise on sugary treats or scary marsupials.

The Dropbear SSH daemon can be compiled with various options, but when one is faced with an existing system that cannot easily be changed, then one has to make do with what one got.
I was trying to download log files and video off an ARM based system and it took forever.  So I experimented with the SSH encryption and compression options to speed it up.  Since a typical embedded system has a dinky little processor, selecting a simpler encryption algorithm can make a huge difference.

AES vs Blowfish

The standard copy command "scp user@target:~/data ." ran at all of 6 Mbps.   I could see the grass growing, which is really special, since I live in a desert.

The default algorithm is AES256, which has special instructions on a X86 type processor to speed it up, but not on an embedded ARM based target.  When I tried Bruce Schneier's Blowfish "scp -c blowfish-cbc user@target:~/data ." it immediately ran at more than double the speed, clocking 13.5 Mbps.  It felt like flying compared to the previous.

Arcfour would run even faster, but Dropbear doesn't have it by default and some people are concerned that Arcfour is not secure anymore, though that is actually a Windows implementation problem.  IMHO Arcfour is not much worse than Blowfish - sorry Bruce...

Header Compression

I then tried header compression (the -C option) and it halved the speed again.  So this poor ARM processor really doesn't like the Zip algorithm either.

Process Control

Finally, I checked to see what the target processor was doing with 'top' and found that one running process was consistently sapping 25% of the processor power, so I thought I would hit the jackpot if I simply suspend that process while downloading.

A bit of remote job control using pidof and kill:
$ PID=$(ssh user@target "pidof -s processname")
$ ssh user@target "kill -SIGSTOP $PID"

Then I did my download test again and disappointingly found that the resulting speed-up was only 5% from 13.5 Mbps to 14 Mbps - where did the other 20 go?  Oh well, I'll take that little bit too thanks.

After the download one can resume the suspended task with:
$ ssh user@target "kill -SIGCONT $PID"

SSH Password Scripting with ssh-askpass

Another disappointment with this version of Dropbear was that it doesn't seem capable of public key authentication, only passwords and typing a password all the time gets boring really quickly, but OpenSSH is not particularly script friendly.

Fortunately there is a utility on Red Hat systems called ssh-askpass.  Users of Debian distributions will have to compile it from source, since it is not in the repositories, due to some misplaced concerns with protecting evil users of SSH against themselves.

Save your target password in a variable called SSHPASS, then use a command like this:
$ SSHPASS=password
$ ssh-askpass -e ssh user@target "remotecommand"

Zenity has a password entry dialogue that is useful for this type of problem.  Later in a script, I'd blank out the password so it doesn't hang around in memory too long, to salve my conscience.


La voila!

Herman

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