Wow, what a bug. I expect the exploit is literally as simple as trying to ssh in as a user with the password has ‘*’ in /etc/shadow and typing anything as the password.

To the extent that systems that are configured in the vulnerable manner exist in the wild, I’m surprised they weren’t exploited years ago by trivial ssh bots.

P.S. Wow, I’m reminded of just how awful traditional UNIX-y C APIs and code are.

P.P.S. The musl code in question is nuts. The API it implements is awful. Seriously, here’s the manpage:

https://man.archlinux.org/man/crypt.3.en

You can’t call this function correctly. sshd’s “fix” is basically to assume that a too-short return is an error return instead of a success return.

PAM is also awful, but this is worse.