This sounds completely insane.
So we delegate security to an alleged "trusted" third party that both the sysadmin and user have to trust.
Sounds like a massive increase in attack surface with questionable advantages.
So we delegate security to an alleged "trusted" third party that both the sysadmin and user have to trust.
Sounds like a massive increase in attack surface with questionable advantages.
anyway nothing new here. these techniques have been deployed for ages. the simpler certificates supported natively by openssh are much better since they avoid x.509 complexity, unnecessary for such short lifetimes and extremely limited application profile.
you do hint at a good point though, the security posture of the CA and method of authenticating to the CA isn’t discussed. user/pass to the CA in many naive environments will reduce the ssh auth to that level.
overall, a worthless article.
Estonia does it, works great for logging in if the service supports it.