X.509 certificates and OpenSSH

[JCA]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Jan Pechanec <jan.pechanec at oracle.com> wrote:
> 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.

   Thanks for your answer, which has indeed dissipated quite a few
doubts. Since I was unaware of RFC 6187 the Saarenmaa draft, I could
not understand how the SSH protocol suite could accommodate for
certificate exchange between client and server.