X.509 certificates and OpenSSH

[Jan Pechanec]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2012, JCA wrote:

>I understand that recent versions of OpenSSH have support for X.509
>certificates, in the sense that OpenSSH clients can extract the
>relevant information from such certificates and use it in order to
>carry out the usual public key-based authentication.

	no, OpenSSH supports its own PKI. X.509 support is available via 
a publicly available patch though.

>Having a quick look into the SSH RFCs, it would seem that this is the
>only way in which OpenSSH supports X.509-based authentication. That
>is, it all boils down to the client, not the server. The server just
>gets a public key, as usual; it never knows whether it has been
>extracted from an X.509 certificate, or from a run-of-the-mill OpenSSH
>public key file.
>
>Is this correct?

	no, it is not. The objective of a certificate is to bind an 
identity to a public key to avoid the distribution of such keys. If I 
give you a certificate and you can validate it, me having a private key 
is a proof that I'm who I claim to be (unless I stole the key). However, 
if I give an SSH server just a public key, me having a private key 
proves nothing about me unless the server can find the public key in the 
authorized_keys file of the user I'm trying to log in as.

	that means that with X.509 authentication, you send over a 
certificate, not just a public key, and the peer (client for server 
authentication, server for user authentication) has to validate it using 
a trusted anchor (usually a CA cert), map the cert to a username or a 
hostname, and let the other side prove that it has a private key. That 
is why X.509 authentication does not need files like known_hosts or 
authorized_keys (but could fall back to them if the cert cannot be 
validated).

	in other words, both sides need to know about X.509, whether for 
a server or user authentication protocol (or both).

	the details on X.509 support in SSH are in RFC 6187, not sure 
how supported that is (it's quite recent). draft-saarenmaa-ssh-x509-00 
has been implemented in quite a few SSH apps out there, including the 
Roumen Petrov's above mentioned patch.

	J.

-- 
Jan Pechanec
http://blogs.oracle.com/janp