3 releases (breaking)
0.5.0 | Apr 7, 2024 |
---|---|
0.4.0 | Oct 23, 2023 |
0.3.0 | Aug 13, 2023 |
#897 in Cryptography
125 downloads per month
17KB
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A PAM module for authenticating using ssh-agent
The goal of this project is to provide a PAM authentication module determining the identity
of user based on a signature request and response sent via the ssh-agent protocol to a potentially
remote ssh-agent
.
One scenario that this module can be used in is to grant escalated privileges on a remote
system with the sudo
command where the identity of the user is confirmed by their ability
to provide a signature made with a local ssh-agent and a private key that never leaves the
designated hardware. I use the Secretive app on
macOS for this purpose.
This project is re-implementation of the pam_ssh_agent_auth
module but does not share any code with that project. The eventual goal of this module is to be
functionally equivalent and a drop-in replacement for pam_ssh_agent_auth
.
This project is currently in a usable state, and has been tested with Ubuntu 22.04. As of now, the path expansion patterns that pam_ssh_agent_auth provides are not implemented. In other words a single authorized_keys file is expected to be used.
Project goals
Since this is security sensitive software and a bug could easily result in undue privilege escalation, the main goal of this project is to be robust and easy to follow for would-be reviewers.
The implementation leans heavily on crates available in the Rust ecosystem that implements the different parts needed for the overall functionality, most notably the pam, ssh-key, and ssh-agent-client-rs crates. Using upstream libraries directly is intended to make it easier to ensure that implementation issues with security implication gets addressed in a timely manner. A secondary benefit is that it is easier to support a wide range of algorithms.
Usage
- use
debuild -b
to build a.deb
package with the shared object and install it withdpkg
- install
doas
, to ensure that you have a different way of elevating your privileges than sudo. You will need to add apermit
line in/etc/doas.conf
for it to work - Replace the
common-auth
include in/etc/pam.d/sudo
withauth required pam_ssh_agent.so
- Configure
sudo
to not drop theSSH_AUTH_SOCK
environment variable by addingDefaults env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK
to the file/etc/sudoers.d/ssh_agent_env
- Add the public key that your ssh-agent knows about to
/etc/security/authorized_keys
Configuration options
PAM modules can be configured using space separated options after pam_ssh_agent.so
in the applicable
configuration file in /etc/pam.d
. pam_ssh_agent currently understands the following options
debug
This will increase log output to the AUTHPRIV syslog facilityfile=/file/name
This will modify the file holding the authorized public keys instead of the default/etc/security/authorized_keys
.
License
Licensed under either of the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT license at your option.
How to contribute
Just open a pull request against https://github.com/nresare/pam-ssh-agent. I have a github action
that runs the test, cargo fmt
and cargo clippy
against diffs (as soon as I get around to trigger them)
so it would be nice if you ran make check
first locally to save a round-trip or two.
Contribution licensing
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
Dependencies
~10MB
~186K SLoC