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Comment by tonyarkles | Hacker News Reader

Just a warning for people who are planning on doing this: it works amazingly well but if you're using it in a shared environment where you may end up wanting to revoke a key (e.g. terminating an employee) the key revocation problem can be a hassle. In one environment I worked in we solved it by issuing short-term pseudo-ephemeral keys (e.g. someone could get a prod key for an hour) and side-stepped the problem.

The problem is that you can issue keys without having to deploy them to a fleet of servers (you sign the user's pubkey using your SSH CA key), but you have no way of revoking them without pushing an updated revocation list to the whole fleet. We did have a few long-term keys that were issued, generally for build machines and dev environments, and had a procedure in place to push CRLs if necessary, but luckily we didn't ever end up in a situation where we had to use it.

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Setting up regular publishing of CRLs is just part of setting up a CA. Is there some extra complexity with ssh here, or are you (rightfully) just complaining about what a mess CRLs are?

Fun fact: it was just a few months ago that Heimdall Kerberos started respecting CRLs at all, that was a crazy bug to discover

There's extra complexity with ssh, it has its own file of revoked keys in RevokedKeys and you'll have to update that everywhere.

see https://man.openbsd.org/ssh-keygen.1#KEY_REVOCATION_LISTS for more info

And unlike some other sshd directives that have a 'Command' alternative to specify a command to run instead of reading a file, this one doesn't, so you can't just DIY distribution by having it curl a shared revocation list.

The hard part is making sure every one of your servers got the CRL update. Since last I checked OpenSSH doesn't have a mechanism to remotely check CRLs (like OCSP), nor does SSH have anything akin to OCSP stapling, it's a little bit of a footgun waiting to happen.

Oh wow... That's pretty nuts. I guess the reason is to make it harder for people to lock themselves out of all their servers if OSCP or whatever is being used to distribute the CRL is down.

Not necessarily. There is a fork of OpenSSH that supports x509, but I remember reading somewhere that it's too complex and that's why it doesn't make it into mainline.

You might want to check out my project OpenPubkey[0] with uses OIDC ID Tokens inside SSH certs. For instance this let's you SSH with your gmail account. The ID token in SSH certificate expires after a few hours which makes the SSH certificate expire. You can also do something similar with SSH3 [1].

[0] OpenPubkey - https://github.com/openpubkey/openpubkey/

[1] SSH3 - https://github.com/francoismichel/ssh3

Why not just make the certificate short-lived instead of having a certificate with shorter-lived claims inside?

You can definitely do that, but it has the downside that the certificate automatically expires when you hit that the set time and then you have to reauth again. With OpenPubkey you can be much more flexible. The certificate expires at a set time, but you can use your OIDC refresh token to extend certificate expiration.

With a fixed expiration, if you choose a 2 hour expiry, the user has to reauth every 2 hours each time they start a new SSH session.

With a refreshable expiration, if you choose a 2 hour expiry, the user can refresh the certificate if they are still logged in.

This lets you set shorter expiry times because the refresh token can be used in the background.

With normal keys you have a similar issue of removing the key from all servers. If you can do this, you can also deploy a revocation list.

Easier to test if Jenkins can SSH in than to test a former employee cannot. Especially if you don't have the unencrypted private key.

My point is that, at first glance, this appears to be a solution that doesn't require you to do an operation on all N servers when you add a new key. Just warning people that you DO still need to have that infrastructure in place to push updated CRLs, although you'll hopefully need to use it a lot less than if you were manually pushing updated authorized_keys files to everything.

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