The OpenSSH project released version 10.5 on 11 August 2026 – just about five weeks after 10.4. The reason for the short gap: three security fixes and a deliberately faster release cadence in response to AI-assisted vulnerability discovery.
The three security fixes
- ssh-agent locking bypass: while the agent was locked, binding requests were rejected, which allowed operations meant to stay local to be performed remotely through a forwarded agent (an interaction with the
[email protected]extension). - Use-after-free in the client: the SSH client fixes a potential realloc use-after-free condition.
- restrict now covers tunnels too: the
restrictkeyword inauthorized_keysnow correctly applies to tunnel forwarding as well.
New features
Alongside the fixes, 10.5 brings handy improvements: the new ssh -Z flag shows which public keys the client would offer for authentication, and in what order. For FIDO hardware keys, the touch-required and verify-required flags can now be managed via ssh-keygen, and keys requiring user presence are tried first.
AI is driving the release pace
The team’s reasoning is notable: it has observed cases in which vulnerabilities first found with AI tools were shortly afterwards discovered independently by other security researchers. To get ahead of such flaws, OpenSSH plans to release more frequently and, when needed, off-schedule. Anyone running OpenSSH should update promptly.
Sources: Linuxiac, OpenSSH Release Notes.
