> On Jul 20, 2018, at 3:05 PM, Jamie Landeg-Jones <ja...@catflap.org> wrote:
> 
> Dimitry Andric <d...@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> For each incoming IP address, sshd does a reverse lookup, and if that
>> results in a hostname, it does another lookup of that hostname, to see
>> if *that* result matches the original incoming IP address.  If it does
>> not, you get this scary warning in syslog about a "possible break-in
>> attempt!".
>> 
>> In my opinion, this is fairly misleading, since almost always the actual
>> cause is badly configured DNS, a very common occurrence.  In addition,
>> matching forward and reverse DNS records is no guarantee at all that the
>> incoming IP address is in any way trustworthy.
> 
> I'm not sure which version this made it into, but they actually removed this
> over 2 years ago. It's not in the openssh that ships with FreeBSD 11.2:
> 
> | commit e690fe85750e93fca1fb7c7c8587d4130a4f7aba
> | Author: dtuc...@openbsd.org <dtuc...@openbsd.org>
> | Date:   Wed Jun 15 00:40:40 2016 +0000
> |
> |     upstream commit
> |
> |     Remove "POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!" from log message
> |     about forward and reverse DNS not matching.  We haven't supported 
> IP-based
> |     auth methods for a very long time so it's now misleading.  part of 
> bz#2585,
> |     ok markus@
> |
> |     Upstream-ID: 5565ef0ee0599b27f0bd1d3bb1f8a323d8274e29
> 
> cheers, Jamie

adding:

UseDNS no

has the added benefit of avoiding a grueling delay when YOU are the one behind 
an IP address with a misconfigured reverse DNS mapping (which is horribly 
common on consumer networks). It goes into /etc/ssh/sshd_config and has been 
among my initial configuration to every FreeBSD box i’ve stood up for a decade.

openssh-portable (in ports, produced by the paranoid fellows at OpenBSD) has 
actually switched to adopt this, UseDNS no, as their default configuration for, 
i think its been a couple years now. This is in addition to dropping the 
message from their log output if UseDNS yes.

There is no point to this foolishly alarming message. Be mindful of the OTHER 
ways you must surely have in place to keep your sshd hard against attack.

-CJ
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