Lab: Secure Shell Keys

Steven J Zeil

Last modified: Jan 28, 2019
Contents:

This is a self-assessment activity to give you practice in working with the git version control system. Feel free to share your problems, experiences, and choices in the Forum.

1 ssh Isn’t Just for Terminal Sessions

You should already be familiar with ssh even if you are used to invoking it through PuTTY.

In this lab, you will be working with ssh from a command line. You will be working with

Let’s start with just the basics of using ssh from the command line.

  1. Try opening a remote session on your server machine by issuing the following command on your client machine:

    ssh -l yourCSLoginName atria.cs.odu.edu

    • You can omit the “-l yourCSLoginName” if your current terminal session is under a user name identical to your CS Dept login name. You can also combine it with the machine name, separated by an “@”:

      ssh yourCSLoginName@atria.cs.odu.edu

    This opens up what should be a familiar text-mode command session on the remote machine. Issue a few commands to verify that everything is familiar, and then log out of the remote machine.

  2. Now give the same command, but append a command string to the end:

    ssh -l yourCSLoginName atria.cs.odu.edu ls -l

ssh is useful for issuing all sorts of commands to a remote machine. The “default” is to issue the command to open a login shell, but you can issue any command you want.

ssh has other tricks to offer as well.

We’ll be making heavy use of both of these features of ssh in the coming semester. However, these will call for a more sophisticated approach to identifying ourselves than explicitly typing in our login names and passwords for every connection to a network service.

2 Replacing Passwords with ssh Keys

ssh keys provide a way of identifying yourself that is generally more secure than simple passwords. Based on one-way cryptography, an ssh key has two parts: a public key and a private key. You can distribute the public key to a variety of server systems that you like to log in to. You keep the private key on client machines that you log in from. Often these client machines are ones you have a certain amount of physical control over — a home computer or a laptop that you own. That physical security is coupled with a lengthy passphrase needed to activate the private key. Once activated, the private key can be kept active through a work session, allowing you to repeatedly log in to clients that have your public key.

2.1 Generate a Key Pair

The ssh-keygen program is most commonly used to generate public/private key pairs.

  1. To generate a key pair, give the commands (on your client machine):

    mkdir ~/.ssh   # if you don't already have this directory
    chmod 700 ~/.ssh
    ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa
    

    You can change the name of the generated files if you like. (I keep different key pairs for different client machines and name them accordingly, e.g., “officePC”, “homePC”, etc.). Do keep it in your ~/.ssh directory, however.

    You will be prompted for passphrase. This is used to protect your private key in case someone gains access to the machine/account where you have it stored. Do choose one. Even though the command prompt says it’s optional, you don’t want to have an unprotected private key around. Most people use much longer passphrases than a typical password, but generally place less emphasis on odd character substitutions that make the phrase harder to type.

  2. Now look in your ~/.ssh directory. You should see your new keys. One file has the extension “.pub”. that’s the public part of the key.

  3. You can do a quick test of your key pair by giving the command

    ssh-keygen -y -fpath-to-your-private-key
    
     

    This command will prompt you for your passphrase and, if you are successful in providing it, will then print the corresponding public key.

    Compare the output of that to

    cat path-to-your-public-key
    

    They should match except for the little “usr@machine” comment at the end indicating the machine on which you created the key.

2.2 Try It Out

  1. Let’s establish this key as one that you can use to log in to your CS Linux account.

    To use an ssh key pair to log into your account on a server, you have to “authorize” that pair. On Linux servers, you do this by adding the public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. authorized_keys is simply a text file that contains a list of public keys.

    There’s at least three ways to do this.

    • The quick way, if your client machine has the ssh-copy-id command, is to do

      ssh-copy-id -i yourPrivateKeyFilename  yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu
      
    • Alternatively, upload the public part of the key to your CS account on your chosen server machine. On that machine, create a “~/.ssh” directory if you don’t have one:

      mkdir ~/.ssh   # if you don't already have this directory
      chmod 700 ~/.ssh
      

      Then add the new key to your authorized key list:

      cd ~/.ssh
      touch authorized_keys
      cp -a authorized_keys authorized_keys.bak
      cat yourPublicKeyFilename >> authorized_keys
      

    Each of the above techniques works the first time you install a key. But if you need to replace or modify a key, these will not be useful. And having multiple but different entries for the same key in your authorized_keys file leads to unpredictable results.

    • As yet another alternative, log in to the server, open ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in an editor and add the public key to the end. (This is also how you can clean up this file later if you want to remove a key, either because the key doesn’t work properly or to clean up after this assignment is done and graded.)
      • If you are replacing a key, be sure to delete the old entry for that key. If you have entries in there for keys you aren’t using, remove those as well.

  2. Now, back on your client machine, try connecting to the server:

    ssh -i yourPrivateKeyFilename -A yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu
    

    You should be prompted for the passphrase for your new key.

If you run into problems with this step or with the ones that follow, check your permissions very carefully. You should have the equivalent of:

chmod 711 ~
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

2.2.1 Wait, did we just make your life harder?

Now, you may wonder what good that was. Every time you try to log in to a CS Linux machine, you will be prompted for that passphrase, which is probably much longer than your old password.

 

But usually, we don’t activate the private key for a one-shot login. Instead, we run a key agent on our client machine. We tell it to activate our private key (giving it the passphrase to prove that we are its owner). It then watches for subsequent ssh connection attempts and offers up the activated private key.

  1. On your client machine:
 
    eval `ssh-agent`
    ssh-add ~/.ssh/yourPrivateKeyFilename


This launches a new key agent and tells it to watch for
incoming requests to validate that private key. 
  1. Then try giving the following commands from your client
    ssh yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu date
    ssh yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu pwd
    ssh yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu ls
    ssh -A yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu
    

    All of these should work with your being prompted at most once for your passphrase. The last one leaves you logged in to atria. From that session on atria, try logging in to sirius:

    ssh sirius.cs.odu.edu
    

    Again, you should find that you are able to do this without being prompted for your password or passphrase. The -A option in the earlier ssh command caused your agent’s credentials to be forwarded into your session on atria.

If you like this, you should look into the package keychain, which is a way to set up agents and activate your keys upon logging in to your client. If you don’t care for it, restore your authorized_keys file in your CS account to its previous state (the .bak file). But keep those keys. We’ll use them later.

2.3 Creating Special-Purpose Key Pairs

Suppose that you wanted to allow someone else to try out a program that you had written and that is sitting somewhere in your account area. Let’s also suppose that you don’t want to make this program available to the entire world. For example, perhaps you are working on a programming assignment in one of my courses and you want me to take a look at your running program.

But we can actually adapt that second approach by limiting the key pair to running only a specific command or program when anyone uses it to log in.

  1. Edit the public key that you created in the earlier steps.

    The key is typically written as a single long line ending in _yourLoginName@machineName_, reflecting where you created the key. To the front of that line, add

    command="/usr/bin/env",no-port-forwarding
    

    and a blank space, right in front of the “ssh-rsa”.

    (If you aren’t familiar with the env command in Linux, run it to see what it does.)

  2. Add that edited public key to your authorized keys list on the server as you did earlier. (Remove the old copy of that key.)

  3. You should still have a key agent running on your client. If not, restart it and add your private key.

    Now try logging in via that key by giving the following commands on the client:

    ssh yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu
    ssh yourCSLogin@atria.cs.odu.edu pwd
    

    Notice that, whether you give a specific command for ssh to execute on the remote server or omit it, trying for a normal login session, what actually happens is that you are logged in to your account, the env command is run, and then you are logged out.

So, to return to our earlier example, if you were working on a programming assignment in one of my courses and you want me to take a look at your running program, you could create a special-purpose key pair to run that program (and do nothing else), and then give me the private key and passphrase, knowing that I would be limited to using your account for that single purpose.

2.4 Playing with Fire: Password-Free Key Pairs

Now we are going to do something a bit dangerous.

  1. Shut down the key agent on your client machine with the command

    ssh-agent -k

  2. Create a new key pair, giving them a different name from the ones you set up earlier.

    This time, however, when prompted for a pass phrase, just hit Enter to create a key pair without a pass phrase.

  3. Test your keys via the commands

    ssh-keygen -y -fpath-to-your-private-key
    cat path-to-your-public-key
    

    Again, the printed public keys should match except for the trailing comment. This time, however, you should not be prompted for a passphrase.

  4. Now, adding that key to your authorized key list would be risky, because anyone who got a copy of the private key would be able to log into your account using no passphrase at all.

    So, to keep this safe, immediately edit that public key. This time add

    command="pwd",no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding
    

    to the beginning of the public key.

  5. Add that edited public key to your authorized key list on the server.

  6. On the client, give the command

    ssh -i path/To/Your/New/Private/Key yourCSLoginName@atria.cs.odu.edu

    You should see that the command is executed without your being prompted for a password or pass phrase.

    If you are still prompted for a password, there may be remnants of your ssh-agent interfering. Try

    ssh -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -F /dev/null -i path/To/Your/New/Private/Key yourCSLoginName@atria.cs.odu.edu

When you have succeeded in completing these steps, remove the keys you have added to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the server.