Our current infrastructure uses ssh keys for passwordless login to our Linux servers.
As our infrastructure grows, managing these authorised keys is getting harder.
As we also have an Active Directory (AD) server, I would like to authenticate the users over ssh using this mechanism, but maintain the passwordless nature of ssh keys.
Is it possible to authenticate the users over ssh without password, using some AD mechanism?
This is usually done via SSH key certificates in order to keep the password-less nature and at the same time have a Central Authority that can be trusted to generate new certificates for each account.
LDAP/Active directory use on login is not advised - apart from having to use passwords, it also becomes a single point of failure for access to any system it manages.
See RedHat documentation on how to do this and also Facebook's good write up on their use of certificate authentication with SSH.
Option 1
This is a good article explaining how to do this.
Storing SSH keys in Active Directory for easy deployment
Basically, it will allow people to post their public keys to your Active Directory and then you can set up a cron script on your servers to fetch a copy of the public keys every 5 minutes or so.
Option 2
You could also use a file server that has all your keys and get each server to fetch from there using a cron script. Obviously, you need a way to verify each key's authenticity especially if you are using FTP or some other insecure protocol. This could be achieved using GPG. You could have a company master GPG key that signs all the employee keys.
Personally, I like option 2 the best because I think it is more secure, but either method should work. Hope this helps!
My approach would be to reduce the problem to an already solved one by
Use active directory to authenticate without password and establish an HTTPS connection using Kerberos. The Dzone Tutorial Configuring Tomcat 7 Single Sign-on with SPNEGO might be a good starting point for that approach.
Wrap SSH into the https-protocol like, see section Wrapping SSH in HTTP(S) at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190490/how-to-use-ssh-over-http-or-https
Related
I am using Redis to store the access token. I want to know if I need to encrypt the token before saving to redis. If yes then please explain why.I am using C# and Stackexchange.Redis library.
As it is stated in the security section of redis documentation
Redis is designed to be accessed by trusted clients inside trusted environments. This means that usually it is not a good idea to expose the Redis instance directly to the internet or, in general, to an environment where untrusted clients can directly access the Redis TCP port or UNIX socket.
So it is better to secure the instance instead of every individual data in it. Redis doesn't support encryption, as you mentioned you need to handle in application layer. You need to wrap the commands by encrypt/decrypt methods.
For extra security, i think you must use authentication by setting password at configuration file. It can be a long one and will be saved in the configuration file so every command will require auth as a prerequisite.
If your concern is security of the instances communicating with redis, that's another topic. auth will not help just like encryption secret. Since both secrets are in the hand of attacker, he can retrieve the original data.
I tried reading Artifactory user guide but the instructions on SSH authentication were not clear. Can someone explain how to do SSH authentication in Artifactory?
Actually, enabling SSH on Artifactory is fairly straight forward, the client is what may require some additional debugging if it is unable to connect for any reason. The steps for enabling SSH on Artifactory are available in the online documentation for SSH Integration. You simply need to create a key pair on any machine with ssh-keygen installed (most linux distros will have this by default), then click on Admin, select Security -> SSH Server, click Enable SSH and add in the private and public key just created. Select a port and set the custom base url if necessary and Save.
Now, the user in Artifactory that wishes to authenticate with SSH needs to add his public key to his profile. This can be done by simply logging in and clicking your username in the top right corner of Artifactory. Under this section, you will need to add your password again and then you can simply paste the public key in the SSH section, you can read about this process in Updating Your Profile.
That's it, Artifactory is now ready for SSH for that particular user, and any other user can add their public key to their profile to use SSH authentication.
Configuring the client depends on which client you are attempting to setup. The most common use case is GitLFS, so I will share some documentation for setting up Git LFS with SSH to Artifactory.
Most of what you need to setup Git LFS can be found in JFrog's Git LFS Repository Authenticating with SSH documentation, or in JFrog's public solution on Git LFS Authentication. The latter contains an example of what the git config file should look like and also contains relevant information on setting up SSH authentication with an nginx reverse proxy (if you have one configured and running).
If this doesn't answer your question, can you please provide some more details on which client you are using to authenticate and specifically what is not working (any relevant error messages or log output), both Artifactory and client-side.
before asking this question i looked through google and tried different alternatives none of which were successful for me, sadly. I'm a little above the noob level. What i want is to basicaly host a wordpress site on a google cloud debian machine.
I was doing good installing services through their SSH access until i got to the point where i installed an ftp service and wanted to access it through a remote computer(my own) i only got as far as to:
Status: Waiting to retry...
Status: Connecting to 104.197.183.19...
Response: fzSftp started
Command: open "root#104.197.183.19" 22
Error: Connection timed out
Error: Could not connect to server
I kept on looking and trying new ways until i found the gcloud documentation for ftp but it is not aimed at new ones, so my questions are:
Where do i input the commands for gcloud, on my computer or on the SSH console(Google cloud machine)?
Do i need to use gcloud for ftp remote access or can i do it entirely through my computer and their SSH machine?
Do i really need to add an ssh authorization file to FileZilla or is there a way i can disable that check on my vps so it lets me sign in with just a username and a password?
What i already tried and didn't work for me:
gCloud documentation for ssh and ftp
Google cloud documention for setting up a wordpress site
Many others
Basically what i need in short is to manage to access the vps through ftp so i can continue with my learning.. Been stuck there two days.
To get access to a users public area, ie. public_html
Go to the accounts Cpanel area and under Security > SSH Access you can import a key file.
You can use PuttyGen to make one, you will need both a private and public key.
Past the keys into the box's.
You may get a warning message about the private key, this is ok.
Go to Manage under public key and authorize it.
Or
Make on using the interface in Cpanel and download both Keys.
Then in FileZilla
Host: IP of server
Protocol: SFTP
Logon Type: Key File
Key File: the PPK you made.
(if you asked Cpanel to make the file select the one that does not end in .pub and FileZilla will convert it for you to a .ppk file.
After clicking connect you should be in
If you still have an error make sure the SSH port (22) is open in your filewalls both Google cloud.google.com > Networks and WHM > LDF/CSF plugin
Use SSH File Transfer Protocol.
No need to install ftp service.
Use winscp for connecting with sftp.
The recommended way of transferring files to a Unix-based Google Compute Engine VM is via the gcloud compute copy-files command. For this, please install the Google Cloud SDK. Then, run a command such as the following:
gcloud compute copy-files --zone=<Compute Engine zone>/path/to/local/file.txt <Compute Engine instance name>:/path/to/destination/file.txt
If you'd like to use FileZilla, you'll have to configure it for access. The SSH daemon on Compute Engine VMs is set up for key-based authentication. This forum post indicates how this is possible in FileZilla. The catch is that you need to put your public key on the VM, which can be a little tricky. gcloud compute copy-files and gcloud compute ssh take care of this for you, which is why they are the recommended method.
I don't really know much about IT and have been working in software development for 3 years. I have used version control with Github and Bitbucket, but I really don't know how SSH, SSL, HTTPS works. Can anyone explain them in the context of version control with a cloud service like Github? Why is TLS not used? A user case example would be most helpful. High-level is fine.
Firstly, while a number of people think SSH relies on SSL, it doesn't: it's an entirely different protocol. The fact OpenSSH relies on OpenSSL might be one of the causes of this confusion (whereas in fact OpenSSL can do much more than SSL).
Secondly, TLS is essentially a newer version of SSL, and HTTPS is HTTP over SSL/TLS. You can read more about this in "What's the difference between SSL, TLS, and HTTPS?" on Security.SE, for example.
One of the major differences (in the context of GitHub and Bitbucket) has to do with the authentication mechanisms. Technically, both password and public-key authentication can be used with or on top of SSL/TLS and SSH, but this is done rather differently. Existing libraries and tool support also matters.
GitHub (with Git) relies on an SSH public key for authentication (so that you don't have to store or use a password every time).
Public key authentication in SSH uses "bare keys", whereas you'd need a certificate for SSL/TLS (and in 99.9% cases that's going to be an X.509 certificate). (A certificate binds an identity to a public key by signing them together.) GitHub would have to use or set up a CA, or perhaps use various tricks to accept self-signed client certificates. All of this might be technically possible, but this would add to the learning curve (and may also be difficult to implement cleanly, especially if self-signed cert tricks were used).
At the moment, GitHub simply lets you register your SSH public key in your account and uses this for authentication. A number of developers (at least coming from the Git side) would have been familiar with SSH public keys anyway.
Historically, Git over SSH has always worked, whereas support for HTTP came later.
In contrast, Mercurial was mainly an HTTP-based protocol initially. Hence, it was more natural to use what's available on HTTPS (which would rule out using X.509 certificates if they're deemed too complicated). AFAIK, SSH access for Mercurial is also possible.
In both cases (Git and Hg), the SSH public key presented during the connection is what lets the system authenticate the user. On GitHub or Gitlab, you always connect as SSH user git, but which key you use is actually what determines the user in the system. (Same with Hg on Bitbucket: ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/....)
I doubt if it is a good question for StackOverflow, however.
All these protocols are used as (secured) channel for Git data exchange. And, when you see 'SSL' most likely SSL/TLS is meant - just to not type both abbreviations. TLS is a further development of SSL protocol.
We currently use the auth_ldap with apache for authentication and due to security compliance we have to change the auth for SVN.
The requirement is pretty simple. Users cannot save password unencrypted locally on clients. Ofcourse, the password can be set to encrypt by individual users by editing the ''servers'' but due to size of the firm, we cannot monitor this and be sure that they are doing it.
What are the available authentication mechanisms?
1) SASL + GSSAPI: I have been struggling to implement this for a while. Looks like it no longer works. See here
2) [RULED OUT] SSH Keys: There is a quite some overhead in adding and removing keys. But this is doable. Ruled out as we have some services that access over https.
3) Passwords: There must be some way to be sure that password are stored encrypted on user home dir.
PS: Not interested in deploying the repo on Widows server.
I'd appreciate if someone can add some insight into possible authentication mechanisms per my requirement.
SYSTEMS: SVN 1.6.11 on apache & RHEL6.2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory.