Tag Archives: ssh

Too Good To, UNIX & Linux

Too good to #0002

2 Comments

Show and update the comment in an SSH private key

ssh-keygen -l -f <keyfile> # show
ssh-keygen -c -f <keyfile> # change interactively
ssh-keygen -c -C <newcomment> -f <keyfile> # change and provide new

ssh-agent in Gitlab CI/CD

  • Define SSH_KEY as a “file” in Gitlab CI/CD variables and SSH_PASSPHRASE as a regular variable
  • If libcrypto errors on execution, make sure SSH_KEY has an additional line ending at the end
before_script:
  - DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update -y
  - DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y openssh-client

sftp_to_somewhere:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - chmod 600 "$SSH_KEY"
    - eval $(ssh-agent)
    - ssh-add "$SSH_KEY" <<< "$SSH_PASSPHRASE"
    - ssh-add -l

Urlwatch, but with a local pop-up window on Linux, no additional infrastructure

Systemd user service:

# ~/.config/systemd/user/urlwatch-to-zenity.service
[Unit]
Description=urlwatch to zenity (service)

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecCondition=sh -c 'nmcli net co | grep full'
ExecCondition=sh -c 'urlwatch > %h/.cache/urlwatch.out'
ExecCondition=sh -c 'test -s %h/.cache/urlwatch.out'
ExecStart=sh -c 'zenity --title Urlwatch --text-info --width=600 --height=400 --filename=%h/.cache/urlwatch.out'

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Systemd timer:

# ~/.config/systemd/user/urlwatch-to-zenity.timer
[Unit]
Description=urlwatch to zenity (timer)

[Timer]
OnStartupSec=1h
OnUnitInactiveSec=2h

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

cookiecount – Load a page and show the cookies it sets

$ ./cookiecount https://example.com
0 cookies received.

ps1_anon.bash – anonymize bash prompt, for screenshots and pastes

# Anonymize bash prompt for screenshots and pastes
# Source from or add to ~/.bashrc
function ps1_anon (){
	if [[ -v SAVED_PS1 ]] 
	then
		PS1="${SAVED_PS1}" 
		unset SAVED_PS1 
	else
		SAVED_PS1="${PS1}" 
		PS1='\$ '
	fi
}

Example:

[martin@idefix ~/devel/cookiecount(main=)]$ ps1_anon
$ ./cookiecount https://reddit.com --json | jq .cookiecount
7
$ ps1_anon
[martin@idefix ~/devel/cookiecount(main=)]$
UNIX & Linux

SSH firewall bypass roundup

2 Comments

So my SSH workflow has reached a turning point, where I’m going to clean up my ~/.ssh/config. Some entries had been used to leverage corporate firewall and proxy setups for accessing external SSH servers from internal networks. These are being archived here for the inevitable future reference.
I never use “trivial” chained SSH commands, but always want to bring up a ProxyCommand, so I have a transparent SSH session for full port, X11, dynamic and agent forwarding support.
ProxyCommand lines have been broken up for readability, but I don’t think this is supported in ~/.ssh/config and they will need to be joined again to work.
Scenario 1: The client has access to a server in a DMZ
The client has access to a server in an internet DMZ, which in turn can access the external server on the internet. Most Linux servers nowadays have Netcat installed, so this fairly trivial constellation works 95.4% of the time.

# ~/.ssh/config
Host host.external
ServerAliveInterval 10
ProxyCommand ssh host.dmz /usr/bin/nc -w 60 host.external 22

Scenario 2: As scenario 1, but the server in the DMZ doesn’t have Netcat
It may not have Netcat, but it surely has an ssh client, which we use to run an instance of sshd in inetd mode on the destination server. This will be our ProxyCommand.

# ~/.ssh/config
Host host.external
ServerAliveInterval 10
ProxyCommand ssh -A host.dmz ssh host.external /usr/sbin/sshd -i

Scenario 2½: Modern version of the Netcat scenario (Update)
Since OpenSSH 5.4, the ssh client has it’s own way of reproducing the Netcat behavior from scenario 1:

# ~/.ssh/config
Host host.external
ServerAliveInterval 10
ProxyCommand ssh -W host.external:22 host.dmz

Scenario 3: The client has access to a proxy server
The client has access to a proxy server, through which it will connect to an external SSH service running on Port 443 (because no proxy will usually allow connecting to port 22).

# ~/.ssh/config
Host host.external
ServerAliveInterval 10
ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew
   proxy.server 3128
   host.external 443
   ~/.corkscrew/authfile
# ~/.corkscrew/authfile
username:password

(Omit the authfile part, if the proxy does not require authentication.)
Scenario 4: The client has access to a very restrictive proxy server
This proxy server has authentication, knows it all, intercepts SSL sessions and checks for a minimum client version.

# ~/.ssh/config
Host host.external
ServerAliveInterval 10
ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/proxytunnel
   -p proxy.server:3128
   -F ~/.proxytunnel.auth
   -r host.external:80
   -d 127.0.0.1:22
   -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0\nContent-Length: 0\nPragma: no-cache"
# ~/.proxytunnel.auth
proxy_user=username
proxy_passwd=password

What happens here:

  1. host.external has an apache web server running with forward proxying enabled.
  2. proxytunnel connects to the proxy specified with -r, via the corporate proxy specified with -p and uses it to connect to 127.0.0.1:22, on the forward-proxying apache.
  3. It sends a hand-crafted request header to the intrusive proxy, which mimics the expected client version.
  4. Mind you that although the connection is to a non-SSL service, it still is secure, because encryption is being brought in by SSH.
  5. What we have here is a hand-crafted exploit against the know-it-all proxy’s configuration. Your mileage may vary.

Super sensible discretion regarding the security of your internal network is advised. Don’t fuck up, don’t use this to bring in anything that will spoil the fun. Bypass all teh firewalls responsibly.

Security, UNIX & Linux

OpenSSH connection multiplexing

3 Comments

The Challenge
I was in touch with a developer the other day who used SSH to programmatically connect to a remote machine where he would start some kind of processing job. Unfortunately, he was in trouble when he wanted to kill the remote process. Killing the local SSH client would leave his job active. He claimed that there used to be some sort of signal forwarding feature in OpenSSH on the machine where he had developed his application in OpenSSH 3.x days, but this feature seems to have been removed by now.
I wasn’t able to confirm anything of this, but this gentleman’s problem got me curious. I started to wonder: Is there some kind of sideband connection that I might use in SSH to interact with a program that is running on a remote machine?
The first thing I thought of were port forwards. These might actually be used to maintain a control channel to a running process on the other side. On the other hand, sockets aren’t trivial to implement for a /bin/ksh type of guy, such as the one I was dealing with. Also, this approach just won’t scale. Coordination of local and remote ports is bound to turn into a bureaucratic nightmare.
I then started to skim the SSH man pages for anything that looked like a “sideband”, “session control” or “signaling” feature. What I found, were the options ControlMaster and ControlPath. These configure connection multiplexing in SSH.
Proof Of Concept
Manual one-shot multiplexing can be demonstrated using the -M and -S options:
1) The first connection to the remote machine is opened in Master mode (-M). A UNIX socket is specified using the -S option. This socket enables the connection to be shared with other SSH clients:

localhost$ ssh -M -S ~/.ssh/controlmaster.test.socket remotehost


2) A second SSH session is attached to the running session. The socket that was opened before is specified with the -S option. The remote shell opens without further authentication:

localhost$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/controlmaster.test.socket remotehost


The interesting thing about this is that we now have two login sessions running on the remote machine, who are children of the same sshd process:

remotehost$ pstree -p $PPID
sshd(4228)─┬─bash(4229)
           └─bash(4252)───pstree(4280)


What About The Original Challenge?
Well, he can start his transaction by connecting to the remote machine in Master mode. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say he starts top in one session and wants to be able to kill it from another session:

localhost$ ssh -t -M -S ~/.ssh/controlmaster.mytopsession.socket remotehost top


Now he can pick up the socket and find out the PIDs of all other processes running behind the same SSH connection:

localhost$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/controlmaster.mytopsession.socket remotehost 'ps --ppid=$PPID | grep -v $$'
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 4390 pts/0    00:00:00 top


This, of course, leads to:

localhost$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/controlmaster.mytopsession.socket remotehost 'ps --no-headers -o pid --ppid=$PPID | grep -v $$ | xargs kill'


Then again, our shell jockey could just use PID or touch files. I think this is what he’s doing now anyway.
Going Fast And Flexible With Multiplexed Connections
With my new developer friend’s troubles out of the way, what else could be done with multiplexed connections? The SSH docs introduce “opportunistic session sharing”, which I believe might actually be quite useful for me.
It is possible to prime all SSH connections with a socket in ~/.ssh/config. If the socket is available, the actual connection attempt is bypassed and the ssh client hitches a ride on a multiplexed connection. In order for the socket to be unique per multiplexed connection, it should be assigned a unique name through the tokens %r (remote user), %h (remote host) and %p (destination port):

ControlPath ~/.ssh/controlmaster.socket.%r.%h.%p
# Will create socket as e.g.: ~/.ssh/controlmaster.socket.root.remotehost.example.com.22


If there is no socket available, SSH connects directly to the remote host. In this case, it is possible to automatically pull up a socket for subsequent connections using the following option in ~/.ssh/config:

ControlMaster auto


So Where’s The Actual Benefit?
I use a lot of complex proxied SSH connections who take ages to come up. However, connecting through an already established connection goes amazingly fast:

# Without multiplexing:
localhost$ time ssh remotehost /bin/true
real    0m1.376s
...
# With an already established shared connection:
localhost$ time ssh remotehost /bin/true
real    0m0.129s
...


I will definitely give this a try for a while, to see if it is usable for my daily tasks.
Update, 2009/05/04: No, it isn’t. Disconnecting slave sessions upon logout of the master session are too much of a nuisance for me.

UNIX & Linux

Using the SSH agent from daemon processes

5 Comments

One of my more recent installations, the BackupPC server I wrote about earlier, needs full access as the user root to his clients in order to retrieve the backups. Here’s how I implemented authentication on this machine.
BackupPC runs as its own designated user, backuppc. All authentication procedures therefore happen in the context of this user.
The key component in ssh-agent operation is a Unix domain socket that the ssh client uses to communicate with the agent. The default naming scheme for this socket is /tmp/ssh-XXXXXXXXXX/agent.<ppid>. The name of the socket is stored in the environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK. The windowing environments on our local workstations usually run as child processes of ssh-agent. They inherit this environment variable from their parent process (the agent) and therefore the shells running inside our Xterms know how to communicate with it.
In the case of a background server using the agent, however, things are happening in parallel: On one hand, we have the daemon which is being started on bootup. On the other hand, we have the user which the daemon is running as, who needs to interactively add his SSH identity to the agent. Therefore, the concept of an automatically generated socket path is not applicable and it would be preferable to harmonize everything to a common path, such as ~/.ssh/agent.socket.
Fortunately, all components in the SSH authentication system allow for this kind of harmonization.
The option -a to the SSH agent allows us to set the path for the UNIX domain socket. This is what this small script, /usr/local/bin/ssh-agent-wrapper.sh does on my backup server:

#!/bin/bash
SOCKET=~/.ssh/agent.socket
ENV=~/.ssh/agent.env
ssh-agent -a $SOCKET > $ENV


When being started in stand-alone mode (without a child process that it should control), ssh-agent outputs some information that can be sourced from other scripts:

SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/agent.socket; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=1234; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 1234;


This file may sourced from the daemon user’s ~/.bash_profile:

test -s .ssh/agent.env && . .ssh/agent.env


However, this creates a condition where we can’t bootstrap the whole process for the first time. So it might be somewhat cleaner to just set SSH_AUTH_SOCK to a fixed value:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~/.ssh/agent.socket


Here’s the workflow for initializing the SSH agent for my backuppc user after bootup:

root@foo:~ # su - backuppc
backuppc@foo:~ $ ssh-agent-wrapper.sh
backuppc@foo:~ $ ssh-add


In the meantime, what is happening to the backuppc daemon?
In /etc/init.d/backuppc, I have added the following line somewhere near the top of the script:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~backuppc/.ssh/agent.socket


This means that immediately after boot-up, the daemon will be unable to log on to other systems, as long as ssh-agent has not been initialized using ssh-agent-wrapper.sh. After starting ssh-agent and adding the identity, the daemon will be able to authenticate. This also means that tasks in the daemon that do not rely on SSH access (in the case of BackupPC, things like housekeeping and smbclient backups of “Windows” systems) will already be in full operation.