> But the problem with static ssh keys is that if they are stolen, it’s undetectable.
It's like, super detectable. You have endpoint logs for the file access, you have network logs, you have sshd logs (which contain the public key and the IP), etc.
> if you have your ssh private key on several machines, you have to remember to copy it to all those places
Your ssh key should never leave a host. That should be a policy and you should write rules to detect when that policy is being violated (check for processes accessing the file).
If you need access from N computers you should be generating N keys.
The reason rotation isn't recommended is because it leads to bad practices (people just add a '1' to their password), it's a hassle, and it can never be fast enough to meaningfully impact an attacker - once they have SSH keys it's likely they can gain persistence and C2 before your rotation takes place. Not because people reuse their passwords in multiple places.
Setting up a CA for SSH is definitely a really good practice but I think that most companies would find it far simpler to just enforce 2FA for SSH access. Still, I'd really like to see an article about how you set that up, especially if it targets smaller enterprise customers.
For others who might be interested, here's bless from Netflix:
edit: Oh, and just to be clear, 2FA for your SSH is not a silver bullet - even a yubikey. But it's a cheap, scalable, near-zero overhead way to protect against an attacker who's got access to your key (but not one who has access to your system, assuming an active session!).
No. You can't assume your logs are trustworthy if you are compromised. You have to assume an attacker will remove any traces of themselves from those logs or will stop them from being written in the first place.
It's pretty standard practice to do this post-exploitation.
Further this requires you to regularly check your log files for suspicious activity, which is way more work than just rotating your ssh keys - which can be easily automated. Running a script that will automatically rotate your ssh keys on all servers in your .ssh/known_hosts is trivial.
Also, rotating your ssh keys is something that has a chance to prevent intrusion, whereas if you see something in your logs it's already too late.
> You can't assume your logs are trustworthy if you are compromised.
It's not that simple. In a larger/mature environment you'll have log aggregation where the initial login is close to certain to be forwarded before it can be messed with. (Unless someone can log in, escalate, kill the right daemon, and somehow prevent monitoring from noticing a missing endpoint - all before the log gets forwarded)
And that's just host logs, without the networking, potential forwarding, etc.
You can assume a lot of logs are not compromised. For example, logs from your network infrastructure. In this case you could trust sshd logs (so long as you ship them off quickly) and network logs.
As for endpoint logs, yes, a privileged attacker could disrupt them. But honestly, even with regards to your endpoint, attackers often don't disable logging - though I do see it, for sure. For "blessed" logging like Windows Event Log you'll have an even harder time - they do take measures to protect the files on disk, even against privileged attackers, and supported methods of deleting the event log actually themselves generate a "Someone deleted the event log" event, which I would highly recommend you watch out for :)
The simplest advice for dealing with this is to ship logs off of the device ASAP and to make sure that disrupting the service requires privileges.
> For "blessed" logging like Windows Event Log you'll have an even harder time [...] even against privileged attackers
Trying to prevent a determined privileged attacker from doing something is an exercise in futility, since it's impossible in every sense of the word. If they have total control over a system, they can do whatever they want, even if you put up a bunch of stopgaps.
Most post-exploitation frameworks (prominent example: DanderSpritz) have modules to remove stuff from the windows event logs without leaving traces.
> Trying to prevent a determined privileged attacker from doing something is an exercise in futility,
That's not really true at all.
> since it's impossible in every sense of the word
Ok? Lots of things are impossible, and lots of those things are also still very very hard and costly. Hash collisions aren't impossible, and yet here we are, with a world hinging on them being very hard.
> , they can do whatever they want
Not really.
> Most post-exploitation frameworks (prominent example: DanderSpritz) have modules to remove stuff from the windows event logs without leaving traces.
You realize that:
a) DanderSpritz's logic to bypass the event log was a huge deal
b) It's literally an NSA leaked exploit????? Like are you kidding me using an NSA developed exploit as "pretty basic stuff" lol
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. That because one exploit exists, and using that exploit is cheap, the entire class of attacks is cheap?
Sorry, but this entire thread is nonsense, and it's just a clear demonstration of a lack of threat modeling and frankly a lack of understanding of what attacker capabilities are.
The basic principle of real security models is once an attacker has full access all data on the system is potentially tampered with.
You can try to play games with ensuring logs leave the system, but everyone takes shortcuts to make sure they can recover the system when networking is down etc.
Everyone and their grandma has access to complex scripts, etc that were once very expensive. Whether they invest the energy in learning methods to hide their presence or just go straight to some other goal is going to depend on how they intend to abuse your systems.
I think most "security professionals" pretend they are going to catch an oddity that occurs that doesn't match what their automated tools would catch and occurs in the middle of some other crisis or holiday break. I would say good luck with that.
> You have to assume an attacker will remove any traces of themselves from those logs or will stop them from being written in the first place.
You’re assuming the attacker has write access to the log storage of the system they ssh into. This is not the norm for production systems. If your auth processes aren’t shipping off logs immediately, your system is broken regardless of ssh.
Ship them off to where? A system that also can be accessed with your ssh key?
If not, can an attacker gain access to your email server or DNS with your ssh key? If either is true, they now have access to everything not protected by 2FA that uses an email address they now control.
There's so many things to get right.
You can design a system such that there's a very high likelyhood even a nation-state attacker won't be able to intrude without leaving traces - if you make no mistakes.
Or you know, you could also just rotate your ssh keys in addition to everything else. "I have logs" is really no excuse to forego something that is this easy.
> Ship them off to where? A system that also can be accessed with your ssh key?
If the ssh key you lost has access to all the critical infrastructure, then, certainly you have a problem. The solution is to not give away write-access keys to your entire system.
> If either is true, they now have access to everything not protected by 2FA that uses an email address they now control.
The initial question was not whether losing a key would cause a breach, but whether a detection mechanism is reliable.
> Or you know, you could also just rotate your ssh keys in addition to everything else.
The question is how does it help? If you can't detect a breach, it will live for as long as your key rotation policy, if not longer. If you can detect and mitigate a breach, it will be closed quickly regardless of your rotation policy.
I've not seen an enterprise environment where "ordinary" sysadmins also have access to the log hosts. Must be extremely rare setup in a healthy environment.
Likewise selldom to see "logging staff" to actually login to a shell. Logs naturally aggregates to some kind of a service with visualizations, alerting and filtering capabilities.
In those special cases an "extraordinary" sysadmin gets onboard a log host, it is not through the ordinary access ways, such as SSH from where the other sysadmins play around.
Holy shit you should not have access to your logging systems/DNS servers with the same exact credentials as your main app servers. Do you let devs onto the HR system with the same ssh key as well?
Elasticsearch existed for years without any authentication on its community tier version, with xpack behind a call with a sales rep and a heavy pocketbook. These days, authentication is provided after you enable the free xpack plugin, but it is not enabled by default and their install guide doesn't exactly point it out to you right away. It starts delving into JVM tuning options before it even references there's this xpack thing you may want to look into.
Console. Cloud login. Different VPN connection. Different credential set then other hosts. Using a hosted service from a completely separate provider. Setting up infrastructure from images without external access.
And I'm sure I missed some - there's a thousand ways to do it.
Posts like this just make me realize how impossible it is to follow every security best practice and stay one step ahead of the latest techniques. You can maybe try tick the most common boxes, but expecting users to be able to police their machines, networks, and other attack surfaces (and still find time to get work done) is unrealistic, IMO. I'm starting to think the common factor here between secure systems and insecure ones is lucking out on having no interested / skilled attackers...
If you need an ssh key for whatever reason from a host (for example, git pulls on a staging machine), you should generate one on that box and narrow it's scope in the machine that will receive it (eg, Gitlab Deployment Keys -- locked in read-only mode, single purpose).
> The reason rotation isn't recommended is because it leads to bad practices (people just add a '1' to their password)
To some degree. I personally rotate my keys whenever I change my personal/work device (perm. change), or, around every year or so. It's not a hard requirement, but just a personal preference.
> it's a hassle
ssh-keygen -b 4096 isn't a hassle... and if you do deployment properly it shouldn't be an issue to sync these keys (eg, an AD system holding public key, cloud directories like JumpCloud, etc can all sync the moment it's updated -- even Salt/Ansible/Chef/etc can do it easily, with modules pre-written to sync keys already).
In any event, MFA is always a good idea. But, my biggest concern is that someone would leave ssh open to the public... the time it takes to setup an ACL or VPN to connect to the machine is hardly anything these days with the amount of automated tooling to do it... so why aren't people?
I was referring to password rotation specifically with those points, not SSH key rotation, because the quote in my post was also in the context of password rotation.
A lot of people think of the SSH keys like PGP keys (where the one private key is your identity) which is not how they are intended to be used (by my understanding which seems to agree with yours). authorised_keys can contain many so you should never need to duplicate a key because you need to access a given account from multiple hosts.
> That should be a policy and you should write rules to detect when that policy is being violated (check for processes accessing the file).
For static locations, one option I like for this is whitelisting the source address for each key (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/353044/). You can then monitor abuse of the policy by looking for keys with no source limit, though this isn't something I've ever done, and it means that a stolen private key is more difficult to use from another location.
Of course this doesn't work for connecting directly from client hosts that move around (i.e. a user connecting from a laptop that could potentially connect from any address unless you enforce VPN access for sensitive resources).
Forget 2FA - yubikeys can be actual full key generation/storage for a GPG key in smartcard mode, and then via gpg-agent those can be used for ssh. (gpg-agent replaces ssh-agent.)
My ssh keys never leave the yubikey.
I have a different dedicated yubikey in each computer, with its own unique key, and a stolen key is useless without its unlock PIN.
No I just don't like having to stop what I'm doing, get up, go into another room or my backpack, and fetch a yubikey, interrupting my focus for 30-90 seconds. I have enough trouble getting and staying focused without additional interruptions.
I have like 4 laptops and two main desktops and if I didn't have 4 yubikeys in them then this would be a multiple-times-daily occurrence. Yubikeys aren't that expensive, and I mostly use the usb-c "nano" ones which are designed to live 24/7 in a computer's port, only sticking out about 2-3mm. Sometimes I have to move them around to other temporary machines but for the most part having approximately the same number of keys and computer workstations means that this is pretty infrequent.
I even have two Davinci Resolve Studio activation dongles for this same reason, and I can't physically edit video on two different computers at once, one would do if I were willing to keep track of where it is and shuffle it around between my various machines as needed.
It's pure speed/convenience, not a response to some data threat.
Then that key can no longer be used. The solution to this resulting in being permanently locked out is to have more than n+1 redundancy in hardware, and ideally meatware too.
the idea is to generate the key in the device, so it never leave the device, therefore you cannot store it somewhere else like another device.
So, the ideia is for you to have two devices, each with its own key, the first device you use daily and the second you use store in a safe location.
if your first device in daily use stop working or is lost you use the second device you have stored to login to your systems to remove the keys from the lost device and add the keys for a new device that replace it and then store the second device back in a safe location.
I have one key permanently in a usb port of each computer, and one on my keychain as a backup (which is also used for U2F and has lightning so works with my phone for 2FA), so five in total, each with their own RSA key for ssh.
If you use GPG and YubiKey approach, you can create the keys in offline computer, store them to YubiKey, and make paper copy of the private key. Also you probably shouldn't have only single way to access the remote computer, I still intend to store password for root that I never use.
I wrote about my endeavour with this approach just few days ago [1].
As backup you can also use OpenPGP cards which cost much less than a yubikey. Or a cheaper Fido2 token if you use Fido2 for SSH access (I don't yet but it's coming into vogue). An OpenPGP card will cost about a tenner, you'll need a card reader to use it but for backup purposes it's perfect.
From Wikipedia: Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) is an open standard that strengthens and simplifies two-factor authentication (2FA) using specialized Universal Serial Bus (USB) or near-field communication (NFC) devices based on similar security technology found in smart cards.
Using Yubikey to mean U2F is like people saying "Google this term", "the image is Photoshopped", "Hoover the floor", "grab me a Kleenex", or even "take the escalator". It possible "Yubikey" could become a generic trademark, but if possible people should be wary of using brand names in this way before it 'sticks'.
Neither Photoshop, Kleenex, nor Google have lost trademark protection.
Additionally, the term Yubikey isn't likely to become synonymous with 2FA in any case. Most people don't know that yubikeys work in several different, independent modes, such as FIDO/U2F 2FA, or CCID smartcard, or Yubico OTP (those long annoying strings your yubikey types when it brushes your thigh or hand).
The CCID smartcard mode requires a pin, which is technically two factor authentication (knowledge of PIN and possession of yubikey), which is an entirely different thing than FIDO/U2F 2FA (which is what most people mean when they talk about using a yubikey for 2FA, not that "yubikey" and "2FA" are interchangeable terms).
This is further complicated by the fact that CCID smartcard mode can be used for ssh (via gpg-agent, with ssh keys inside the yubikey itself), AND, separately, OpenSSH (with other keys) can use a yubikey for U2F.
No endpoint security system I'm aware of being used outside of core banking/telco/government system logs all file accesses. It would crash instantly for one single build of your average NodeJS application.
File monitoring is particularly slow, though not for any fundamental reason. But you can still monitor lots of files efficiently by just limiting which files you look for, which lots of companies do.
Oh I mean I know how to do it, I just mean I'd like to see companies talking about how they do it, and I'd really really like to see someone make it drop-dead simple.
It's valuable to hear how companies are protecting their infrastructure if they're going to break down how they accomplished it, how they continue to maintain it, etc.
We use symops[0] to connect to our servers. Not sure about the implementation details, but the gist is that we connect through our aws credentials (via SSM), which we retrieve using Okta, which is then protected using 2fa. No ssh key to be found, and you can disable all ssh ingress rules. Since this is via SSM, you can also use the full power of AWS IAM to allow/deny access.
Also, Sym can be set up to require approvals too which is great for security auditing since it's a third party.
OpenSSH 8.4 added support for FIDO2. It's literally the same commands (with some different parameters) to take into use as a normal keypair. And FIDO2 tokens are becoming quite affordable. To me 2FA with SSH became a solved problem with that.
I used a Yubikey and needed also to install 'ykman' to set a PIN for my token, otherwise ssh-add kept failing. Dunno if I omitted something for a proper setup for my token initially, but I don't think that was a problem with OpenSSH in particular.
Apart from the small headache with the PIN, the whole thing was almost magical in its simplicity.
The token must be pin protected to be eligible to resident credentials. I think it is one of the significant differences between FIDO1 and FIDO2. I also think that you can use ed25519-sk with a non pin-protected, but then you won't be able to authenticate if you can't access to the generated key file (if it was deleted or on another machine)
Thanks for the info. Makes complete sense to require a PIN with resident keys, I'm glad. Now I'll need to write the article myself, with this information included :)
If I don't know how to do it, where do I start to understand ?
Edit: I suppose I am asking how does it "all" fit together. The CA that grants servers or services a short lived key - the other servers that then can trust that. It makes kind of sense but I think I am missing some parts as when I try and read how others do it, some parts seem to be missing.
Too many blog posts seem to be something something kubernetes will arrange it. Or Oauth or ...
For example, this article seems to blow against the idea of a central key management service like Vault and have the device decide to rotate keys. But I am not 100% sure because it's one sentence. And how do they provide authentication for a service account (say a web worker that processes some incoming requests). That's not device+person. The same idea can happily apply but do they?
How? I could check at any point in time if the file is being accessed now, but how could I ensure that it hasn't been accessed in the past? The ext4 access time can be forged by the same process that accesses the file. Should I have a daemon running to check this? If so, then why isn't this already a feature in common Linux distros?
> If so, then why isn't this already a feature in common Linux distros?
It is. It's called auditd, is quite possibly already installed (albeit probably not configured to do much), and can easily ship its logs off to another host (natively or via syslogd).
> if you have your ssh private key on several machines, you have to remember to copy it to all those places
Private keys should be per-host. I did copy my private key across multiple machines way back when I was a bit greener and first learning about how SSH worked. I did that for years. Not everyone knows best practice automatically and we should try and educate instead of shaming people who do it.
BUT
When you believe you have enough knowledge on the subject to go and write an article about SSH key best practice and you're still casually doing this as if it's OK, that's different. This is basic stuff; I have no interest in following any advice from this author if they think copying private keys to different hosts is ok.
Also, "ssh -A" allows you to take your keys with you. I also used to copy my keys around, but now I just use "-A" option when ssh'ing into a different host from my main workstation when I need my keys for something (git cloning for example).
It would be really nice if there was an "ssh update" feature similar to ssh-copy-id but built into the ssh command itself. So I could somehow indicate to SSH on my machine that key_2 is a replacement for key_1 - and any host that I ssh into that has key_1 in authorized_keys should be replaced with key_2 (and leave everything else the same).
That way I could rotate keys and painlessly update them (and still have the old key for rarely accessed machines).
Sure it's not perfect, but it's a sight better than never rotating.
I wonder if there's something similar for the ssh_host_key - somehow to say "old key is deprecated but still here so ssh doesn't scream bloody murder, but use the new key from now on".
> I wonder if there's something similar for the ssh_host_key ...
There is, since version 6.8 (~6 years ago) [0].
Make sure you have "UpdateHostkeys" set to "yes" (or "ask") on the client side. It was off by default when it was first added but I think I remember reading at some point that it changed to enabled by default.
The author of this article should consider following their own advice, since they have a woefully outdated RSA-1024 ssh key securing their GitHub account.
It would still take a long ass time to brute force a 1024 unless there is no brute force detection. Alternatively capturing the traffic can allow brute forcing the applied algorithm itself.
I wasn't commenting on the strength of RSA-1024, per se, but on the assumed age of that key. OpenSSH's ssh-keygen hasn't defaulted to 1024 bit RSA keys since before version 4.2, in 2005. (I had to look it up: https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html)
You can still generate a 1024 bit RSA key, but someone would have to go out of their way to do so, and I can't imagine why they would have done that in the past .. decade?
> I can't imagine why they would have done that in the past .. decade?
Maybe they aren't using software keys, but rather a low quality/older/small-kb hardware token or following the default guide for one? The vast majority supported 2048 in 2010 though..
It's a public key, you can perform the "brute force" (factorisation) entirely offline, to derive the private key. Hypothetically. For now, RSA-1024 is too expensive to crack, for mere mortals.
Similar to the recommendations to use a YubiKey/hardware token, SeKey on a Mac lets you use a key generated in the Secure Enclave in an unexportable form (https://github.com/sekey/sekey)
Does anyone know of the TPM equivalent for this? I found this [1] but when I tried it, the Windows Hello prompt only accepts USB security keys and not the fingerprint sensor in my laptop (already set up for login).
My knowledge of WebAuthn is limited but their invocation of the relevant API seems like it should work for fingerprints also.
With ssh the situation is quite good, and it should serve as an example on "how to do it right".
I find web services to be a huge pain, though: Obviously most don't offer any kind of 2FA, or maybe Google Authenticator or SMS at best (which means those websites must be so bad that people don't login to it on their phone?). But even those who do "proper" 2FA often will only allow a single U2F token - and enforce GA, SMS or a secondary email as fallback.
(Putting this rant here so maybe a webdev or even two do it better the next time they do some auth stuff ;-))
You should always have keys per device (as has been discussed in other comments here). So if you have >1 device, you'll automatically have backups.
> If so, how do you protect that ?
While it may seem bad to have some keys less securely protected than others, the ability to revoke a single device means that using Yubikey / Secure Enclave / whatever on one device is still better than using them on none.
The cool-kids answer to this problem is --- in very Tailscale-fashion --- not to have static keys at all. Instead, you issue short-expiry certificates, ideally from a strong root of trust, like an IdP that does 2FA. There are other benefits; for instance, you don't have to directly provision keys to machines anymore.
One thing that always has scared me a bit with using CAs for SSH is how you protect the signing certificates? After all, if an attacker gets that cert then they get full access to everything, and can masquerade as anyone. You end up with a choice between a) have lots of SSH keys out in the wild, each with varying degrees of access, or b) have a single cert that is on your infrastructure but has access to everything. (Not to mention how you deal with the operating the site, what happens if it crashes? How do you log in without the site to sign your ssh key? Using standard trusted SSH keys to access feels like its somewhat undermining the point of using CAs).
Has anyone solved this, or got a write up of some best practices for running this? All I've managed to find are articles about how to run such apps, rather than how it fits into the broader security architecture.
Ideally ideally, what I would actually like is the ability to configure OpenSSH to require multiple things to log in, i.e. both that they SSH key is trusted and that it has recently been signed by the signing service. That way gaining access to the signing certificate doesn't help without also gaining a trusted SSH key (it's still bad, but not quite Game Over levels of bad). I had a quick look to see if I could hack together a patch to do this, but alas I had forgotten how weak my C foo is :(
If you have no compliance requirements, you can also just use any pkcs#11 token (with support for non-extractable keys) to secure the key, and setup an air-gapped process on a laptop with a bootcd, etc, to minimize the risk of compromising your process.
> ... what I would actually like is the ability to configure OpenSSH to require multiple things to log in, ...
With OpenSSH, you can require multiple authentication methods to succeed before access is granted.
For example, "publickey,password" to require password authentication after key-based authentication has succeeded. You could even do "publickey,publickey,publickey" to require three different keys to be used!
This has been supported for several years, by the way. See "AuthenticationMethods" in the "sshd_config*" man page.
> ideally from a strong root of trust, like an IdP that does 2FA.
I understand the concepts, but how does this work in practice? Do you have an example of generating a short-expiry certificate from an IdP, such as Google?
You can do it directly with OpenSSH, no need for third-party software. There are many good blog articles / tutorials on the subject, e.g. search for "ssh ca certificate". Most people don't know that you can do this but it's actually quite easy.
I did a bit of reading on the topic. But it is still unclear to me what the workflow is. How would a typical day look like for an admin and one of the users?
Isn’t the real problem here having too many cooks in the kitchen?
If you have a small number of people who have access to your production environment, and they practice their trade like they are actually trusted with said production access, that provides a very small attack surface which can be analyzed and hardened.
But then you're forcing an organisation style/hierarchy because of a tech problem. If I want all my developers to be able to access production directly for quick development, then that should be possible
What about setting up a staging environment mirroring production?
Most security experts recommend restricting prod access away from your dev team because doing so alleviates risks from a compliance perspective, and prevents bugs and regressions from being introduced inadvertently.
I’m not providing links here because I do think it’s worth googling and discovering more of the nuanced points many others have made. Sure, you’ll find some shops that use another model, but for most use cases separate environments exist for a reason.
In my experience ( as a developer) this doesn't work in practice, since mirroring an actual, complete bunch of production systems in a large company is a difficult task unto itself! More often than not, you end up with a staging environment as per the security guys recommendations, but which is unfortunately barely usable.
It also makes investigating difficult bugs extremely difficult (staging tends to be slightly different from prod, smaller as well, different hardware, network, etc) since you can't reproduce them, and your prod team can't help you much, since what you need is actual full box access to poke around.
A passphrase on your key is a great idea, but as soon as you unlock it once it's cached in memory. Since processes are not isolated within a user they're allowed to scrape the memory of other processes. If you check your running processes you're going to see that ssh-agent is running as your current user.
But a far more likely scenario is that the attacker will simply leverage existing sessions/ steal a socket, which, notably, will bypass any sort of 2FA on SSH connections.
Or store your keys in a different user. I personally use have the users dotancohen and dotancohens (trailing s for Secure) on my laptop. I simply su into dotancohens and then from there SSH into various servers. The /home/dotancohens/ directory has 0700 permissions.
On Linux, you can harden a bit against memory dumping by disabling ptrace. Set the "kernel.yama.ptrace_scope" sysctl to 3 and the easiest attack will no longer work, if you have processes that don't explicitly request disallowing ptrace.
I actually don't believe that scraping memory is the easiest attack, I just mentioned it informationally. I strongly believe attackers are more likely to hijack sessions.
But yeah, ptrace is definitely something to watch out for. Monitoring ptrace is also something defenders can do if they're not in a position to disable it (if you're working for a software company your engineers will ptrace).
But it does help; in most cases, it requires no effort whatsoever, in contrast to using something like SSH certificates which may not even be possible, depending on the environment.
There's no such thing as perfect security, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't lock your door.
You'd want to use a strong passphrase. Even if you do, it's protecting the physical key. If an attacker has access to the that they can perform an offline attack. i.e. attacking a passphrase offline with decent hardware and no likelihood for being noticed means it had better be strong!
I believe this article is a bit out of context, yes?
In an ordinary environment (at home, at big corp.) you treat your keys as highly personal valuables and would not store keys at shared storage (unless special circumstances, due to air gaps or because shared non personal jobs need to run with a key - and then by a separately generated key).
If I'm at that point that I would have to rotate my private SSH key, then game is lost anyway.
If the storage at your personal device cannot be encrypted, might it be a solution to pass along something like ssh-add - <<< "$(pass show ssh/env1-key1)", and have that gpg-key on a yubikey for instance.
In my (perhaps too small) view, this issue is not the issue, and the issue should instead be tackled. For instance, not by letting SSH be publicly accessible as the first thing and educate staff on locking their personal workstations. With the correct mindset other things should be of focus in the area of security.
I understand why they don't talk about the CA functionality in OpenSSH (they want to sell their own product after all), but OpenSSH supports CA-based certificates out of the box, which makes it easy to generate auto-expiring SSH credentials. Then again, with a CA-based approach the root key becomes the golden key and needs to be protected, which might still be easier than protecting individual keys though.
I recommend using a bastion host through which all SSH connections go and to use a DevOps tool like Ansible to automate certificate/key placement on every single host. In addition, if you have a trusted network that people log in via VPN you should also limit SSH connections to the bastion host to addresses from this network, which will make it harder again to use stolen credentials. Finally, only a handful of people should have such credentials, most maintenance should be performed in an automated way via DevOps tooling.
If you use the u2f support in openSSH the risk of credentials being stolen without you knowing basically goes down to zero (as in, if you have the physical key the credential isn't stolen).
Sure, inventory is unaccounted for but you as an engineer knows it's not accounted for. So you go to IT, and you ask for a new one. IT revokes access of the original key, and gives you a new one.
No one in that transaction cares if it was lost or stolen.
But it’s not enough to steal a blank YubiKey from the office storage room. You would have to steal some specific person’s activated YubiKey, and that person will notice it if they need the key regularly to do their job.
Logically you're going to need some kind of digital key, and logically keys can get stolen. So the problem is detecting theft. Rotating keys is not detecting theft, YubiKey is not detecting theft. Could some kind of jump server where all your ssh connections for your company's servers have to originate from do the trick of logging, reporting and restricting usage to detect theft? You log in with key1 to an unprivileged account on the jump server, and it decides if you look genuine (based on ip/ time of day/ time since last usage/ whatever) and then alerts an admin if a trigger is ticked. Then if you get access, you as a user are given logs to help you detect theft. Then if all is well you SSH to your actual destination, perhaps through port forwarding using key2 stored on your local machine, or perhaps from the jump server with key2 stored there.
Using a separate secure element built into a smartphone is probably the best solution here. Most smartphone users will not lose them often, and will notice almost immediately.
> An even more robust approach is to use some kind of hardware token that can sign short-lived ssh keys, and teach all your servers how to deal with those. That’s neat, but it’s hard to deploy (needs custom ssh settings).
I looked at using this setup once - but the whole setup looked really precarious.
Using U2F in the browser, you just buy the cheapest yubikey, plug it in and it works - any OS is fine.
But to do the same with SSH you've got to buy a particular yubikey, install five different bits of software, adjust a bunch of config files, restart services, adjust your agent autostart files, upload your 'subkeys' (whatever those are)... and that's just to support one OS.
It just seemed like the kind of second-class-citizen setup that barely anyone else is using or testing against, so it'd be constantly breaking down.
U2f support is available in recent versions of OpenSSH - though ideally you should to configure a pin code as well, which requires some configuration. Can't speak for how good this support is as I've not used it - but for web it is as you say zero, configuration, and just works, always.
For GPG/SSH, there is a bit of an initial setup process to setup the card and generate keys (ideally generate them on-card, so you know they cannot be exist elsewhere) - this can be scripted though, as we have done. As part of our deployment process we generate all needed passphrases and revocation certificates, storing in encrypted storage, as well as uploading the public key to a known URL, which is also referenced in the smartcard configuration.
Once the card is setup - all you need on a machine is gnupg/gpg-agent and a ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf file that looks like:
I've had one on my keychain for a couple of years now, and so far it appears to hold up pretty darned well. It sits in my pocket unprotected with all my other keys, and despite its fair share of scratches it still works.
The reason for the "testing" is that they appear kinda "flimsy" compared to my Nitrokey, but so far it has stood up to every beating i've given it.
Have used them for the past 6 or so years, and issued as standard to any engineers needing sensitive system access - over 30 or so keys that have been used and thoroughly abused over that time I've only ever seen one broken - somehow an engineer managed to snap off the top half of it that attaches to a keyring. The hardware was still functional though.
I have not looked into it, but isn't there some way to "backup" a Yubikey ?
There is probably a difference between company usage and personal usage. In a company setting i would expect to have backup yubikeys, but for a personal setup a recovery situation would involve getting your keys "out of it" until a replacement arrives.
On the other hand, I chose the first option (several years ago) -- and doing so saved me from having to generate new keys (and rotate them on every host I used) when I got my Yubikeys replaced the second time (due to a bug in the key generation library used on the Yubikey).
--
I generated my new GPG key while booted into a "live CD" environment on an air-gapped host.
Because I believe in doing things right, I deliberately selected a machine for this task that 1) didn't have Intel AMT/ME, 2) didn't have any wireless network interfaces, 3) had no storage devices installed, and 4) had PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard (for "better"entropy)!
I set up the new Yubikeys, generated my new GPG master key, and generated a different ("authentication") subkey for each Yubikey. The master (certification) key and signing and encryption subkeys -- but not the authentication subkeys -- were exported and then backed up on a brand new USB flash drive that I'd purchased at a retail store, just taken out of the package, and created a small LUKS-encrypted filesystem on -- using an outrageously long, randomly-generated passphrase, of course.
The USB flash drive is kept in a sealed envelope inside a tamper-evident bag that's kept in the safe. The passphrase is kept, well, somewhere else, obviously, as is the passphrase for the GPG master key. Using the keys on the Yubikey doesn't require them; only the PIN -- which is long but not as long as the passphrases -- that exists only in my head -- and that's easy enough; I typically do that a few dozen times a day.
Since going through that whole process, there have been two times that I've retrieved the USB flash drive and passphrases. Once was to sign a bunch of GPG keys (from a key-signing party) and the other time was in order to rotate my authentication (SSH) subkeys and "renew" (i.e., extend the expiration date of) the others.
Was it a huge pain in the ass? Absolutely! Was it worth it, though? Sure. First and foremost, I don't worry about the security of my keys at all and -- perhaps more importantly -- I don't have to keep an eye out for the next bug that's found in the third-party (Infineon, IIRC) libraries that Yubico chose to use.
The article mentions copying a Let's encrypt style architecture where keys are tied to user+device which can be rotated frequently, and some service blasts the public keys around as necessary. Are there any good, existing open source implementations of such a setup?
Assuming one existed, how would it handle the passphrases used to protect your ("the user's") new keys and how would it securely communicate the new key's passphrase to you ("the user")?
>The approach we take in our own infrastructure, modeled after TLS certificate infrastructure and Let’s Encrypt in particular, is to authenticate each device+person combination with a separate private key; that way, if a credential is stolen, we always know from where.
The startup I co-founded, bastionzero.com, is motivated by this exact problem: What is the best way to do SSH key management. We hope to improve remote shell access by replacing long lived SSH keys stored on your machine with cryptographic identity attestations from multiple sources, e.g. OpenID Connect, FIDO, Network, etc... The end goal is to eliminate both single points of trust and long lived secrets.
I like using KeypassXC to manage my SSH keys. It can cooperate with an SSH agent and avoids leaving SSH keys unencrypted on disk if you care about that. Honestly though I use it so I can keep my secrets together in an easy to sync location.
Definitely not appropriate for protecting Real Infrastructure, but for my handful of personal machines I put my authorized keys in a Google Doc and configure hosts to download it using `AuthorizedKeysCommand`. Makes it easy to add and revoke hosts in one place, which also makes rotation possible.
I have a hardware-backed "doomsday key" to use if the Google Doc stops working.
All code you install to your machine. System packages, Python packages in virtualenvs, scripts.
I don't keep important private keys in my .ssh folder. Well, it's just security by obscurity. An educated, determined attacker would find them. But
some random malicious code would not immediately find them.
The main issue here is that in the JavaScript ecosystem there is this trend of using external dependencies for everything, regardless of size (i.e., leftpad), and trusting forward versions blindly. Security in npm / JS / node_modules ecosystem is quite reactive, instead of active.
If there is a bad actor that releases a widely using dependency, for sure it's going to be gone from npm quite fast most of the time! However, it'll take some time for it to get noticed, and people will invariably get affected.
You shouldn't bring an open honeypot to a place where bears can attack you easily, right?
If you remove the "regardless of size" part, you'll be describing any modern language dependency system.
And most of them also execute external code on module importation... what I'm not sure if it's even relevant, because you will run the module at some point anyway.
So, yeah, JS makes the problem one or two orders of magnitude larger. But the problem is still there, whether you use npm or avoid it.
Yeah, if I was an evil mastermind, I'd silently gather all private keys I come across. Then check them against all that zillions of public keys available all over the internet
Yubikey + OpenGPG + Enable SSH support on your gpg agent
Unless I'm missing something, that essentially solves the issue, no? Persistent private key, usable across all your machines that can't be exfiltrated. Bonus since you can even generate the key directly on the device!
This gets even easier with newer OpenSSH versions if you use FIDO2 auth for SSH. I've not played with it personally, but word is you just plug in the key and off you go
For a single person that a pretty good solution just make sure you backup you SSH key so you can recover if you lose your yubikey.
In a multi-person enterprise the issue becomes how to manage all these keys with on-boarding, off-boarding, logs, access policies as people's roles change. Maybe someone only needs access for a day? How do you ensure their key is removed tomorrow morning. Maybe someone never setup their yubikey and their SSH key is just living on their laptop and backed up to dropbox. SSH is a great solution for individuals but I've encountered so many anti-patterns when used among large teams.
There is sekey app for macs, use it. There are also yubikeys which can be used for SSH and OpenSSH knows how to use fido keys, so even more to choose from.
Also ssh supports "from" stanza, which allows you to limit networks from where you can login. Ideally it should set to either corporate network (and make people to vpn to your corporate perimeter before going ssh) or to your home ISP range (if you're not a company). It's not a replacement for key rotation, but significantly reduces probability of described case.
> Also ssh supports "from" stanza, which allows you to limit networks from where you can login.
Additionally, sshd supports "Match", which can limit where any or all of your users can log in from.
There's also
"AuthenticationMethods publickey", "PasswordAuthentication no", and "PermitRootLogin no", all of which one should also be using -- ideally, on top of (both host- and network-based) access lists / firewall rules preventing access to 22/TCP from everywhere except the hosts and/or networks you've explicitly permitted.
I will never understand people who think a bastion host or "jump box" is a good idea. I've seen so many companies that have experienced extended downtime because they had an issue and it also broke their jumpbox - so nothing could be fixed until their bastion host was fixed. Plus, the companies I've bought that used bastion hosts ended up having the worst security on the jumpbox machine because it's a "set it and forget it" machine that isn't normally treated like a production server. I've seen bastion hosts that had root kits for years and nobody noticed because they never really logged in to look around at the bastion host itself.
I've never understood the appeal, nor have I seen anyone do it well, honestly. It seems to get mentioned in all of these novice and semi-pro SSH related articles as a good idea and just makes my eye twitch when I see it.
Have a yubikey to connect to your jumphost(we called that access vm), then have a cronjob that will, every month, deploy ansible, generate a key pair on the accessvm and deploy those new key on accessible vms (ideally not your log collecting vm, that should be even more secured.).
Were you using some awesome new cryptographically secure method to manage the passphrases of the newly generated keys (and communicate them to the user)?
Or, more likely, were all of these new private keys granting access to all of your hosts just sitting there on disk unencrypted -- and, as a result, freely available to and easily stolen and used to gain access to all of your production machines by the first attacker to come along and compromise the bastion host?
I just have my SSH keys on a yubikey: They're generated on token and the private key can't be exported. This makes them unique and unstealable.
They can still be abused "live" while they are inserted via an SSH agent, but I turned on the "touch to sign" feature so for every use you have to touch the token button as well.
If you're on AWS I strongly recommend EC2 Instance Connect, which uses the AWS CLI and IAM to issue short lived SSH keys that are automatically accepted by EC2 instances you have been granted access to via IAM policies.
It's like, super detectable. You have endpoint logs for the file access, you have network logs, you have sshd logs (which contain the public key and the IP), etc.
> if you have your ssh private key on several machines, you have to remember to copy it to all those places
Your ssh key should never leave a host. That should be a policy and you should write rules to detect when that policy is being violated (check for processes accessing the file).
If you need access from N computers you should be generating N keys.
The reason rotation isn't recommended is because it leads to bad practices (people just add a '1' to their password), it's a hassle, and it can never be fast enough to meaningfully impact an attacker - once they have SSH keys it's likely they can gain persistence and C2 before your rotation takes place. Not because people reuse their passwords in multiple places.
Setting up a CA for SSH is definitely a really good practice but I think that most companies would find it far simpler to just enforce 2FA for SSH access. Still, I'd really like to see an article about how you set that up, especially if it targets smaller enterprise customers.
For others who might be interested, here's bless from Netflix:
https://github.com/Netflix/bless
edit: Oh, and just to be clear, 2FA for your SSH is not a silver bullet - even a yubikey. But it's a cheap, scalable, near-zero overhead way to protect against an attacker who's got access to your key (but not one who has access to your system, assuming an active session!).