Comment on Self hosted SSH key repository?
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 1 year ago
I would switch to certificate based SSH authentication.
All the server keys gets signed by your CA, all clients also gets signed by your CA. Everyone implicitly trust eachother though the CA and it’s as safe as regular SSH keys.
You can also sign short lived client keys if you want to make revocations easier, the servers don’t care because now all it cares is that it’s a valid cert issues by the CA, which can be done entirely offline!
HashiCorp Vault can also help managing the above, but it’s also pretty easy to do manually.
mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 1 year ago
I do this, use the small step ca/Cli to manage the lot. It’s amazing
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 1 year ago
It’s such an underrated feature. It baffles me how people immediately turn to overly complicated solutions solving a problem they don’t really have to solve, just because everyone assumes the only way is the default commonly known way. Like OP, people immediately jump to the conclusion you need extra software to manage the keys, rather than using another authentication method natively supported, and keep filling their known_hosts file with junk, making the whole validation process useless because everyone just accepts whatever key the host presents.
It’s amazing how simple it is. Developer needs temporary access to debug a web server? Sure, here’s your 2h valid cert to log in as the web user on the server, don’t even need to actually log into the server to put their key in and then remove it. I mint a cert and it’s ready to go on whichever users and servers I specified in the cert. Can’t even gain persistence because regular authorized_keys is disabled and we have limited session durations.
I regularly leave people baffled at work because I come up with a clever and built-in super simple solution to something they expected to just slap more scripts and software to work around the only way they know to use the software. Read your manpages in full folks, it’ll save you so much work. Know what your software is capable of.
mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 1 year ago
That’s a long rant, but your on point with it. I have a colleague who refuses to try new things cuz they don’t understand that it makes life easier, I do tend to find the solutions that are simpler and easier to work