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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

I am keeping an eye on the new (and alpha) Authentik agent which will allow idp based ssh logins. There's also SSSD already supported but it requires glibc (due to needing NSS) meaning it's not available on Alpine.

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If you mean using OIDC, in that space there's at least https://github.com/EOSC-synergy/ssh-oidc, https://dianagudu.github.io/mccli/ and OpenPubkey-ssh discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43470906 (which might mention more).

How does SSSD support help with SSH authN? I know you can now get Kerberos tickets from FreeIPA using OIDC(?), but I forget if SSSD is involved.

Can't really speak to the point of the guy you're replying to, but the FreeIPA implementation via SSSD does more than just Kerberos tickets. Actually, I think the Kerberos based stuff as it relates to SSH is GSSAPI as part of sshd itself and has little to do with sssd, though I could be wrong.

That said...

If I'm remembering things correctly (and it's been a looong while since I've played with this), FreeIPA's client configures sshd with an AuthorizedKeysCommand that executes a program that queries sssd for the list of authorized keys for a given user. Sssd then uses a plugin to query the LDAP server @ FreeIPA to get the list of keys.

There's also SSHFP (I think) records in DNS if you're using FreeIPA's DNS servers. These provide the host keys for servers for your ssh client to check against. Not sure if that's integrated into ssh itself or something else -- I can't remember how it's implemented offhand -- but it's fairly nifty since you never see the TOFU prompt (or it would be if DNS was actually secure, anyway).

Yes, FreeIPA is Kerberos+LDAP+X.509 CA, and GSSAPI is in OpenSSH (normally with the key exchange patch). SSSD is a local mechanism, not network authentication. I mentioned authorized keys distribution mechanisms elsewhere, but I was thinking authentication (c.f. OIDC), not authorization.

I haven't used SSSD due it not being available for Alpine but doesn't it provide authentication via pam_sss ?

Yes, but its authN components only act locally, and PAM is optional for sshd. It can/does call out to network services like Kerberos/LDAP given a password, of course, but I was thinking of network authN connected directly with OIDC somehow, for which I don't know a mechanism in vanilla OpenSSH. (I don't know what Authentik does for this -- I could imagine it's behind the scenes somehow.) I should probably look it up sometime.

My understanding is since it's an agent running on the target, possibilities will be quite extensive. But it is relatively new and there is no stable release of it yet.

https://docs.goauthentik.io/endpoint-devices/authentik-agent...

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